Regarding the incentive structure, I think you're right - there's no way to eliminate the friction that comes from competing incentives. Our experience has been that empowering the product organization to make that tradeoff themselves leads to the optimal outcome for the business. The goal isn't to eliminate the tradeoff between speed and quality, but surface it, and put it in the hands of the people who are the business decision makers, which tends to be product.
Re test data - we had seen this bottleneck with our previous product, which was purely about crowd testing. What we've seen since we shipped no code automation is that much of the data seeding by less mature teams can be done through the tests themselves. This is suboptimal, but with automation so cheap and fast, it works. Then over time the engineering team can seed the states that are most often created through the tests.
Regarding the incentive structure, I think you're right - there's no way to eliminate the friction that comes from competing incentives. Our experience has been that empowering the product organization to make that tradeoff themselves leads to the optimal outcome for the business. The goal isn't to eliminate the tradeoff between speed and quality, but surface it, and put it in the hands of the people who are the business decision makers, which tends to be product.
Re test data - we had seen this bottleneck with our previous product, which was purely about crowd testing. What we've seen since we shipped no code automation is that much of the data seeding by less mature teams can be done through the tests themselves. This is suboptimal, but with automation so cheap and fast, it works. Then over time the engineering team can seed the states that are most often created through the tests.