Apple greenlit the original iPod in March 2001 and shipped iPods to customers just seven months later in November. How’d they move so fast?
For many products, teams, and ultimately companies, execution speed is the difference between winning and losing. All else being equal, teams that excel in shipping velocity often outperform and outlast those that don't. An important note: Be cautious about viewing speed as a problem, or a way that bad products get shipped. Strong teams almost always reduce the trade-off between speed and quality to near zero.
Here’s a simple checklist I’ve used to help teams troubleshoot why shipping velocity is not as fast as it could be.
Unclear vision or strategy: Non-clarity is a real drag on executional speed. If you don’t have a concrete vision or strategy, teams tend to bounce around doing work with differing points of view on where the collective is going. Any initiative should begin with a crystal clear lens on where this problem to solve fits into the wider vision and strategy. One watch out: Be wary of a vision and strategy that is actually way too long. If someone on a working team cannot articulate the basic vision and strategy back to you in just a few sentences, you are not as clear as you think you are. Don’t count on working teams to work through ambiguity that leadership can create; it slows teams down.
Too many priorities: Too much in flight work, a lack of focus, real switching costs, and cloudy communication spell disaster for product teams. Whether at a company or team level, setting real—and sometimes painful— priorities helps teams move faster by removing non-essential projects from their plate. One watch out here: If prioritization doesn’t hurt, then you’re not actually prioritizing—you’re sequencing. Try this as an exercise: Take your existing roadmap, simply cut everything after the first two or three items…and delay everything else.
Bad decision making: The speed and quality of decision making in any team or company can silently kill execution velocity. What this looks like: slow decisions, bad decisions, decisions that get remade over and over, or often just a really inefficient process for how decision-making gets made. Get good at using clear decision making frameworks like RAPID to define what everyone’s role is in a decision and unlock your team’s speed. Bonus points for learning about five-day alignment techniques to move your teams into high gear.
Lack of ownership at ground level: Sometimes team velocity is hindered by excessive checking and “product reviewing” conducted with or for senior leaders. Good teams have a review cadence that makes sense and gets them valuable feedback and direction. But if your senior leader is either asking to (or is actually) checked with constantly, this action slows teams down and kills ownership and agency. One example to read: In the book Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal, McChrystal sought greater speed and efficiency in counterterrorism operations so he removed himself from a nightly approval process for all terrorist assassination missions. This decision fundamentally shifted the operational dynamics and gave teams ownership and speed working off clear guidelines.
No date for your project to ship. It’s amazing how creative, focused, and clear teams get when they are working off a defined ship date. Meetings get shorter and happen less often, and discussions get more crisp. Everything has a cadence of moving forward because, well, it has to. One watchout here: Avoid overthinking target dates, which can lead teams to waste time on falsely precise estimates. Adjusting a date at the end if needed can sometimes be perfectly fine. What’s important is having that date work towards – it helps teams generate urgency which is the lifeblood of execution velocity. Which leads me to...
A culture of urgency. The most valuable tool for creating a high velocity team is simply a culture of urgency. This is a team that has its own unstoppable cadence for moving forward, where problems, or blockers are not allowed to fester. Urgency cultures also show up with an attitude rooted in shipping. These teams often have every part of their operation optimized around a bias for action as opposed to sliding into easy delays. A very simple example: Team A says, “What do we need to make a decision now and move this forward?” Team B says, "Ok, let's pick this up in next week’s meeting and see where we are.” Big difference. What are some factors that can help create a culture of urgency?
Leaders who drive pacing and cadence. This can be any team member (great PMs do this naturally) but someone always needs to identify, call out, and then help solve issues getting in the way of progress. This is the type of person who asks “Why do we need until next week for X? What’s stopping us from having it tomorrow?”
Be wary of teams that place 100% of velocity issues on an engineering team. There are MANY parts of a project that can lag and slow teams down. Urgency is an everyday value–not something that shows up only as build stages ramp. Be mindful of the front side of any product development project taking longer than it needs to.
Talent density. Bluntly—B and C players will kill speed. It’s okay to acknowledge it. Related, this speaks to the value of well-run, real performance reviews built around actual impact created.
Tie velocity to the mission. Nothing beats teams stating speed as value and working toward it. Velocity does not just happen. The best teams intimately tie execution velocity to a team’s mission. If you believe in your team or company’s mission at a visceral level then you really should be in a hurry. This approach elevates a mission beyond mere words, making it a motivational force.
Some links to read further on execution velocity:
From Patrick Collison’s website. This catalogs examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together. Example: “Disneyland. Walt Disney's conception of "The Happiest Place on Earth" was brought to life in 366 days. Inspiring.
Speed as a Habit. This article is by Dave Girouard, CEO of personal finance startup Upstart, and former President of Google Enterprise Apps. “Speed is a defining characteristic—if not the defining characteristic—of the leader in virtually every industry you look at.”
Sense of Urgency. Read this blog post by Facebook CTO Andrew Bosworth. "Every day people are frustrated by the tools they are forced to use because we haven’t launched our next product yet. Billions of hours of human existence are wasted on bugs and lackluster features in existing products."
Jeff Weiner on speed of decision making and RAPID (5 day alignment breakout follows). From the LinkedIn Learning course: Leading like a CEO: “The speed and quality of your decision-making and at the end of the day, if you're going to ask me how do companies maximize long term value creation, this is it.”
Brandon Chu's blog post "The Time Value of Shipping.“This emphasizes that delivering customer value quickly is better than delaying, as user expectations increase over time, and the scope of an MVP can expand the longer it takes to ship.
If this helped you think more clearly about leading teams or products, I write here once a week.
Subscribe here.