“Build the right thing, and build it fast.” It’s a mantra we hear all the time in product development and delivery. Teams are told to prioritise velocity — delivering faster and more efficiently — because it leads to happier customers, lower costs, and greater impact. Or so the story goes.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: value is unknowable upfront. What we call “value” is an educated guess, a hypothesis about what might matter to our customers. And until the customer — the ultimate arbiter of value — gets their hands on it, we’re flying blind.
This is why speed, on its own, doesn’t solve the problem. Delivering the wrong thing faster wastes time and amplifies poor decisions. The real advantage of speed isn’t how fast we build — it’s about how quickly we can learn whether what we’re building matters.
In my experience, velocity is an empty promise without feedback; assumptions about value can lead us astray, so the most impactful teams focus on learning loops, not just shipping faster.
The Velocity Trap
“Build it faster, and you’ll win.” It’s a seductive idea, isn’t it— and one that’s deeply flawed. When teams focus solely on velocity, they risk falling into what I call the Velocity Trap: the belief that delivering more, faster, automatically equals success.
Here’s the problem: Speed without direction is wasteful.
If you’re building the wrong thing, delivering it faster doesn’t make it better — it just gets you to the wrong outcome sooner.
If your delivery process sacrifices feedback, learning, or quality to prioritise speed, you’ll pay the price later in rework, customer dissatisfaction, or technical debt.
Velocity, when misunderstood, encourages teams to value output over outcomes. Instead of asking, “How do we know this is valuable?” teams ask, “How do we ship this faster?” And while it might look good in metrics like story points or cycle time, the real-world impact can be underwhelming — or outright negative.
A Common Misstep
Imagine a team rushing to deliver a feature their leadership is convinced will revolutionise the market. They meet their deadline, celebrate speed, and… customers barely use it. Why? Because nobody stopped to validate whether the feature solved a real customer problem.
The lesson? Focusing on velocity without feedback amplifies risk. You’re gambling on your assumptions about value and doing it at lightning speed.
The Real Advantage: Feedback
If speed alone doesn’t guarantee success, what does? The answer lies in feedback. The real advantage of delivering faster isn’t about getting more features out the door — it’s about learning sooner whether what you’ve built is valuable.
Speed matters, but not for its own sake. It matters because it shortens the time between building something and finding out if it works. The faster you get feedback, the quicker you can:
Validate assumptions: Are we solving a real problem (that the customer cares about)?
Pivot or persevere: If it’s not working, how can we adapt while keeping one foot on the ground?
Build trust: Customers and stakeholders see progress, feel heard, and become more confident in our ability to deliver value consistently, strengthening the relationship and fostering collaboration.
Don’t Build the Full Restaurant Until You’ve Tested the Menu
Imagine you’re opening a restaurant in a new city. You’ve done your research: your chosen neighbourhood loves Italian food, so you focus on pasta. You hire the best chefs, design a menu with classic dishes, and open your doors, convinced that you’re delivering exactly what customers want.
But when customers walk in, they’re not ordering your signature dishes. Instead, they’re asking for gluten-free options and lighter meals. You realise that your assumption — that “pasta” equals value — was wrong. The true value your customers are looking for is something different.
Now, imagine if you had started smaller. Instead of investing in a full restaurant upfront, you ran a food truck that experimented with different types of meals. One week you serve traditional pasta, the next you add gluten-free options. By the time you open your restaurant, you’d know what your customers value because you’ve tested it in the real world.
This highlights that:
Assumptions ≠ Value: Your initial ideas about what’s valuable are just hypotheses.
Feedback Reveals Value: Only by putting your “menu” (product or feature) in front of customers can you learn what truly resonates.
Iterate to Find the Right Fit: Early feedback allows you to adapt before committing to costly investments.
Feedback as the Foundation of Impact
Faster feedback transforms speed into a multiplier of success. It’s not about how much you can build but how quickly you can learn. Velocity without feedback is just noise. Feedback turns speed into clarity and direction.
Impact lies at the intersection of speed and learning — it’s driven by how quickly you can uncover what truly works.
Here’s the formula:
Impact = What You Build × How Fast You Learn
If you build the wrong thing, your impact is zero — no matter how quickly you deliver it.
If you learn too slowly, you miss the opportunity to adapt, improve, and stay competitive.
Shift the Focus from Output to Outcomes
The most impactful teams don’t measure their success by how much they build or how fast they deliver. They measure it by the value they create for their customers and their business.
This means asking tough questions upfront:
Is this solving a real problem for our customers?
How will we know it’s valuable?
What assumptions are we making — and how quickly can we (in)validate them?
The Virtuous Cycle of Impact
Focusing on feedback creates a virtuous cycle:
Build something small and testable.
Learn quickly through customer feedback.
Adapt based on what you learn.
Iterate — better, smarter, and closer to what your customer needs.
The faster you run this cycle, the more impactful your delivery becomes. It’s not about building more, but building the right things — and stopping when you’ve solved the problem (80–20 rule).
Call to Action: Break the Velocity Obsession
It’s time to rethink what speed in delivery really means. Instead of chasing velocity as an end in itself, we need to focus on what it enables: faster learning, more thoughtful decisions, and greater impact.
Here’s how you can make that shift:
Anchor on Feedback Loops: Deliver small, testable value slices and learn from them. The faster you can validate assumptions, the less risk you carry forward.
Measure Outcomes, Not Output: Stop measuring success by how much you’ve delivered. Instead, ask, “What difference did this make for our customers and our business?”
Prioritise Ruthlessly: Every feature is a hypothesis of value. Focus on solving real problems and avoid the temptation to “build more great stuff” just because you can.
Celebrate Learning, Not Just Delivery: A feature that doesn’t work is not a failure — it’s an opportunity to learn and improve.
My Final Thoughts
Speed isn’t about delivering more; it’s about discovering faster. The real advantage of velocity isn’t how quickly you can ship — it’s how quickly you can learn what’s valuable and what’s not.
So before you push for faster delivery, ask yourself:
What are we building?
Why do we think it’s valuable?
How soon can we find out if we’re right?
Because, in the end, it’s not about speed for speed’s sake. It’s about building the right thing, predictably, and delivering it when it matters most.