Speed is a side effect of making the system work

When leaders ask teams to "go faster," they're usually not asking for better outcomes. They're asking for more output. More stories delivered. More code shipped. More visible progress.

Implicit in that ask is a pretty big assumption: that we already know exactly what needs to be built, that the plan is correct, and that execution is the only thing standing between us and success.

So "go faster" becomes shorthand for "execute the plan harder."

That's where things start to go wrong.

What “faster” usually means in software development

In practice, pressure to move faster shows up as pressure on throughput. Velocity. Stories per sprint. Features delivered by a date. The focus shifts to how much work we can push through the system in a given amount of time.

When that happens, teams don't usually drop the most obviously visible practices. They still write tests. They still deploy. They still do ceremonies. But they start cutting corners where the cost is harder to see.

They stop paying attention to composition. Validation gets deferred to later. Changes get batched together because it's "more efficient." The optimization shifts from learning to delivery.

What they end up with is not just suboptimal solutions to problems, but solutions that are built in a suboptimal way.

The second-order effects of chasing speed

People often frame this as a "quality" problem, but that conversation has become so muddled it's almost useless. So let's talk about what actually happens downstream when speed is chased directly.

You think you've got product-market fit

First, teams convince themselves they're closer to product-market fit than they really are. When something doesn't work, the instinct is to add more features rather than validate assumptions. Speed becomes a way to prove we were right instead of learning whether we were wrong.

You lose adaptability and ease

Second, adaptability drops. New opportunities emerge, market conditions change, but the software is too coupled or too rigid to adjust quickly. Ironically, the faster we tried to move earlier, the harder it is to move now.

Things become fragile and start breaking

Third, brittleness sets in. Changes start producing unexpected behaviors. Every release feels risky. The system becomes fragile because compositional concerns were treated as optional rather than fundamental.

I've seen teams that could ship daily become teams that need two weeks of QA for every release. That's what happens when you prioritize delivery over composition.

Scaling challenges create blockers and slow things down

Fourth, scalability suffers. Demand shows up, but the system can't handle it. Infrastructure creaks. Performance degrades. Teams scramble to stabilize what should have been designed for change from the start.

And yes, eventually, everything slows down.

Chasing speed almost guarantees it.

Push, push, push replaces flow, flow, flow. Corner cutting becomes normalized. People who raise concerns get labeled as goldplaters or dogmatic, as if there's no dogma in "speed above all else."

What speed looks like when It emerges

When speed is a side effect rather than a mandate, it feels very different inside a team.

There's trust. There's flow. Communication is high quality and frequent. Work happens in small batches. The problem is well understood. Composition is treated as real work. Decisions are made with clarity and confidence. Outcomes matter more than output.

It's not that these teams never hit obstacles. They do. But they recover quickly because the system is built for adaptation, not just execution.

Teams don't feel rushed, but things move quickly. Recovery from mistakes is easy because the changes are small. Learning happens continuously, not in big postmortems after something breaks.

Why organizations get this wrong

At an organizational level, speed is often treated as a trait of developers rather than a property of the system.

When things slow down, leadership pressure increases. Teams are told to move faster, questioned about their practices, and asked to justify discipline. And when things eventually go sideways, responsibility is pushed downward.

The unspoken message is: leadership sets the pressure, workers should have known better.

That's backwards.

Speed does not come from heroics. It comes from flow. And flow is a systems concern. It's shaped by incentives, structure, batch size, composition, and validation. Leadership owns those conditions whether they acknowledge it or not.

Speed Is not the goal

If there's a single belief shift here, it's this:

You don't get speed by demanding speed. You get speed by making the system work.

Focus on outcomes, not output. Reduce batch sizes. Pay attention to composition. Validate before, during, and after. Remove bottlenecks instead of pushing harder.

Do those things, and speed shows up on its own.

Not because you asked for it, but because you created the conditions for it.