Stop Prioritizing Speed Over Progress

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Today we're going to discuss the difference between real product progress and the illusion of momentum created by speed.

Early-career product managers often get praised for being "fast." People say "Fail fast" or "Be quick to pivot". And while those statements good mantras generally speaking, speed can be deceptive.

Moving quickly doesn’t mean you’re moving in the right direction. And it certainly isn't an indicator of progress. Over time, chasing speed can quietly undermine everything that makes your product team effective.

"Fast" is easy to measure and easy to reward. Stakeholders see things shipping and assume progress is happening. Product managers get addicted to the dopamine of delivery.

Shipping quickly is useless if you’re always shipping the wrong thing.

But you can ship every week for a year and still have nothing to show for it if you’ve been chasing noise instead of signal.

And the stakeholders that you're trying to please or impress with speed will be the same ones who end up calling you out for having no real progress to show for it.

"Our Product Managers are always celebrating, but we aren't acquiring new customers, we aren't churning any less. All we really have is a list of new, small features nobody uses.

Takeaway 1: Urgency is a drug, and product managers are often the dealers

Everyone loves a fast-moving team. Velocity feels good. But urgency is easy to manufacture. All it takes is a deadline, a few Slack messages with red exclamation marks, and a vaguely referenced exec meeting on Friday.

Sometimes the urgency is forced by leadership. It becomes appealing to some Product folks because it takes the accountability off them to deliver results.

Suddenly, the whole team is sprinting toward something nobody fully understands.

Product managers are rewarded for keeping things moving, so they learn to create urgency as a way to show leadership. But this creates a culture where everything feels like a fire.

The team burns out. The quality dips. Nobody has time to ask why they’re building what they’re building. It becomes easier to push work forward than to pause and challenge whether the work even matters in the first place.

All you've really done is put your customers on the backburner, your real roadmap in the trash, and have your own influence and leadership cut down at the knees.

Urgency is not a strategy. It’s a tactic. If you travel down this road too often, you're going to crash.

Takeaway 2: Shipping is not the finish line

A product manager once told me, “Our team ships every week. We’re killing it.” I asked what they’d learned in the last two months. He said, “What do you mean?” That’s the problem.

Shipping is not a sign of success. It’s an opportunity to observe what happens next. Did the behavior change? Did the metric move? Did we learn something useful about the problem? None of that can be answered by the act of shipping alone.

Product managers who over-index on speed tend to ship and forget. They don’t build in observation time. They don’t set success metrics beyond “we launched it.” And they certainly don’t revisit what they shipped a month ago to see how it’s performing.

They’re too busy moving on to the next thing.

Velocity without feedback or iteration is just a treadmill.

Takeaway 3: Most teams are not too slow, they’re too distracted

Product managers love to blame slow progress on blockers. “We’re waiting on design.” “Engineering is underwater.” “Legal hasn’t reviewed the copy.”

But the real reason most teams feel slow is because they’re juggling too much. They’re not blocked. They’re scattered.

The product manager who’s always “hustling” to unblock things often contributes to the chaos. They’re managing five unrelated workstreams at once, pushing forward half-baked requirements, and shifting priorities every other week.

The team never gets to finish anything with depth. Everything stays in a perpetual state of “almost done.”

Many companies, especially large ones have groups that almost act as internal vendors to each other, not real partners. If you want to move faster AND add more value, align all these different groups; Product, Design, Engineering, Legal, etc, at a single set of shared outcomes.

This is a call for leaders to be honest with themselves and their teams. Not everything you're working on is high priority. In fact, 80% of it probably isn't worth doing at all. So stop killing the real momentum by trying to do too much.

Focus makes teams faster. Not fake speed. Ruthless prioritization is the real productivity hack.

Takeaway 4: Know how to slow things down on purpose

This is the secret nobody tells you. Great product managers create space. They ask questions that slow down momentum just long enough to make sure it’s pointed in the right direction.

They don’t panic when a sprint starts without a packed backlog. They’d rather take a beat to clarify the problem than rush into building something that sounds right but solves nothing.

They ask things like:

“What’s the evidence this is a real pain point?”

“What are we hoping to learn from this release?”

“Are we solving this with the right level of fidelity?”

“What happens if we don’t build this?”

Those aren’t stall tactics. That’s what real strategic thinking looks like. And it takes confidence to ask those questions when everyone else is pushing for speed.

Pausing is not the same thing as slowing down. Sometimes it’s the only way to move forward with intention.

In Conclusion

Speed feels like progress. And in the short term, it can be. But over time, moving fast without thinking deeply just leaves you with a pile of features no one uses, a team that’s burned out, and a roadmap full of junk.

The real job of a product manager is not to move fast. It’s to add value. And to do so deliberately.

That means saying no to fake urgency. It means creating focus instead of chasing adrenaline. It means building slack into the process so your team can think, learn, and adapt.

Stop being obsessed with speed. Start being obsessed with clarity. That’s how you get somewhere worth going.

Thanks for reading. See you next week.