The Speed Myth
Moving fast doesn’t matter if you’re running in the wrong direction.
“Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.” — Navy SEALs
Your competitor releases new features every week. Those updates and constant releases. Their changelog is a bottomless pit. (If there is anyone else who’s an Evernote user, you will know what we mean.) And your competitors brag about speed. Move fast and break things, they say. Fail fast. Iterate quickly. Speed is everything, they claim.
So you speed up with daily deployments, shorter sprints and faster decisions. Ship now, fix later. You’re keeping pace with them. So you’re also building the wrong product faster than they are.
Speed is a really overrated competitive advantage in business. But few do question whether moving fast actually helps. But many assume speed equals progress. It doesn’t. Speed equals the distance you have travelled. Progress requires travelling toward something that really matters.
Moving fast in the wrong direction just gets you lost faster.
The Velocity Trap
Companies confuse activity and being seen to be busy with achievement. Measuring their outputs. Those features shipped, releases deployed, and tickets closed. Metrics go up. Everyone feels productive.
Nobody asks if any of it mattered.
You may have shipped fifteen features this quarter. But how many did customers actually use? You may deploy code daily. Ask if stability improved or declined? You made really quick decisions. But how many did you have to reverse later? You moved fast, but did you get anywhere worth going?
Speed without direction is just chaos with better PR.
Google+ launched fast. Facebook took years to open beyond colleges. Quibi moved fast from concept to launch. They raised money, built, and launched quickly. They were gone in six months. TikTok took years to find product-market fit through multiple changes of direction and iterations.
The company that moved more slowly won every time.
Fast Breaks Things That Matter
“Move fast and break things” works when breaking things is cheap. Break a feature, you fix it. Break user trust, and you lose customers. And break your architecture, and you accumulate technical debt. Break your culture, and you lose your best people.
Not everything should be broken fast.
Companies that optimise for speed cut corners. They skip research. They reduce testing. And they make decisions with incomplete information. They ship before they’re ready. Sometimes that’s fine. Usually, it creates problems that take ten times as long to fix as to prevent.
You don’t do the user research or competitive intelligence. So you spend precious months fixing missed needs and features. Then you skip the tests. pend hours and weeks debugging.
Speed can be very expensive when you count the cleanup costs.
When Slow Wins
The best companies are deliberately slow about things that matter. Slow to hire. Slow to enter markets. And slow to change strategy. Slow to react to competitors. They’re fast to execute once the direction is clear. They are patient about getting direction right.
Apple is famously slow. They watch markets for years before entering. They iterate internally for years before launching. They’re rarely first. They’re usually best. The iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone. The iPad wasn’t the first tablet. The Watch wasn’t the first wearable. Apple was slow and right.
Nvidia spent decades building GPU technology before AI made it dominant. They were slow and patient. Amazon was slow to enter AWS, advertising, and grocery. Each time, they moved only when they understood the opportunity. Berkshire Hathaway is built on being slow: slow to invest, slow to sell, slow to change.
The companies playing the long game don’t optimise for speed. They optimise for being right.
Speed as Competitive Theatre
Fast shipping creates the appearance of competitiveness. It signals momentum. It keeps employees energised. And it impresses investors. It generates content for social media. Look how fast we’re moving. Look how much we’re shipping. See how agile we are.
None of it matters if you’re building things customers don’t want.
You can ship a hundred unused features or one essential one. The second is better but slower. It needs research, testing, refinement, and patience.
Most companies choose speed because measuring it is easier than measuring value. You can count the features shipped. You can’t easily measure whether those features mattered. So you optimise for what you can measure and act as if it’s what matters.
The Right Speed
The question isn’t “How fast can we move?” The question is “How fast should we move given what we’re trying to accomplish?” Sometimes fast is right. Sometimes slow is right. Wisdom is knowing which is which.
Move fast on reversible decisions. Pricing tests. Marketing and Sales team copy. Design tweaks. Small features. If you can undo it easily, move quickly. Make slow decisions on irreversible choices. Architecture choices. Market positioning. Team structure. Strategic direction. If it’s hard to reverse, take the time to get it right.
Move fast when you have clarity. Move slowly when you need to.
Thought-Provoking Question
“What are you rushing to ship that would be better if you waited another month to get it right?”
Practical Advice
Review your speed of action and value separately. Track how quickly you ship and see if it creates real value for customers and the business. Only maintain speed where it aligns with positive outcomes and measurable impact. Create a “slow list” for your team. Perhaps identify five things you’ll be deliberately slow about. The hiring, architectural decisions, market expansion, pricing, and changes in direction. Being explicit about where you’ll move slowly gives you permission to move fast everywhere else without feeling guilty.
Every quarter, review everything you shipped quickly. Ask yourself and your team: what did you ship fast that you later regretted? What did we rush that we had to redo? What shortcuts created bigger problems? Calculate the true cost of speed, including rework, technical debt, and opportunity cost. You’ll find that moving fast often costs more than moving right.
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Key Takeaways
- Moving fast without direction leads to chaos; it doesn’t guarantee progress.
- Companies often mistake activity for achievement, measuring speed instead of value delivered.
- Fast shipping can create costly mistakes, breaking trust and increasing technical debt.
- Deliberate slowness in important decisions often leads to better outcomes, as seen with successful companies like Apple and Nvidia.
- Rethink your speed: focus on when and why you should move fast or slow to achieve meaningful results.
