On Velocity and Product Development

In DevX and product building, there's a huge focus on velocity of late. Here's my take.

Pieter van Noordennen | Aug 8, 2023

On Velocity and Product Development

“The biggest lever to high velocity is designing your organization structure so that teams are forced to cooperate.” —Geoff Charles, VP of Product, Ramp (from Lenny’s Podcast)

Velocity! We need more of it!

That’s the cry heard from many founders, developer marketing professionals, and product leaders these days. With good reason: An organization’s ability to learn quickly (alternatively: fail fast) is paramount to survival in a competitive world.

Recently, it feels like every conversation I have, either in product development circles or the world of developer-first security, is centered on velocity.

A recent conversation with a product leader I really admire led me to dusting off my copy of Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc., his seminal work on creative culture that documents how he built Pixar’s one-of-a-kind dream factory. I brought it with me as I’m traveling to Las Vegas for my first ever Black Hat security conference.

En route to the airport, I listened to Lenny’s Podcast interviewing Geoff Charles, VP of Product for Ramp, the run-away unicorn payments company that’s been one of the great recent success stories in the startup world. The title of the interview: “Velocity over everything.” Charles has pushed his team to extremes, such as no meetings and no ticket-writing, to achieve phenomenal results.

On the plane, I popped on ESPN to watch a summer classic that fills me with nostalgia: The Little League World Series. It triggered in me a memory from my Little League days that stuck with me and has formed one of my core principles related to velocity.

Here are a few highly aligned but loosely coupled observations on Velocity from these three experiences:

Velocity Lessons from Little League: Throw Harder

To be clear, I never made it to Williamsport, where the finalists for the LLWS play. But I loved baseball and played a LOT of it in my youth. I didn’t have a big arm. I didn’t throw fast or I overpower hitters. But I had good enough control to throw strikes, mostly, and could get enough people out to earn a spot in our team’s regular rotation.

In one game, when I was around 12 years old, things just were not working for me. The other team was getting hits, and as a result, I was trying to be very precise with my pitch placement. I was missing badly, and had given up several runs and walked the bases loaded. I was angry with myself, embarrassed for what I was doing to our team, and frustrated. The harder I tried to paint the corners, the worse it got.

Finally, our coach, Mr. Fernandez, called time out. I can still see him clearly in my mind: white polo shirt, push-broom mustache, our team’s cap half-on, half-off his head. He wore this permanent smirk that said: “Life is one big game.”

I was sure I was getting the hook, but he merely took the ball, rubbed it a few times, looked me in the eye, and said: “Throw harder.”

I’m sure I protested. I already couldn’t find the strike zone. Throwing harder was sure to make me more wild. But he went on: “More velocity will make it easier to place your pitches. You’re trying to be too perfect.”

I think back on that advice a lot. When I’m locking up, nervous, or frustrated, it pays to just get something out there.

As a PM at TripAdvisor, the head of product for our Restaurants group, Gerard Murphy, had a saying for this: ‘F—k it, Ship it.’ A bit on the nose, perhaps, but true nonetheless.

A product in the hands of users is better than one in your head. What you need is learning and feedback, not more deliberation. Feedback will make the shortcomings clear and help you zone in on your target.

In MIT Sloan’s Product Development course, Professor Steven Eppinger emphasizes the need for idea volume. Ideas, he points out, exist along a normalized distribution from Bad to Great. Taking more shots (i.e., generating more ideas) is required to find truly great ones.

Throw harder; throw more.

Velocity Lessons from Lenny’s Podcast: Speed Wins

In the interview with Charles, a discussion on “single-threaded teams” ensues. Charles organizes PMs and engineers into the magic 3:1:1 ratio (Engineers:PM:Designer), gives them a clear and singular goal, and lets them loose. They take velocity to such an extreme that PMs don’t write JIRA tickets or break down work, merely provide a vision and high-level spec. This lets engineers organize their work as best as possible, and puts the PM in the position to answer questions, make decisions when necessary, and support design.

Charles goes further to talk about the “high cost of accuracy” — and how at early stages in the product development process, you don’t need accuracy, just learning and iteration until you get traction. It’s a refreshing concept, and I was inspired by Charles’s ability to take product best practices and make them his (and his team’s) own.

One other insight came from Lenny himself, calling back to his interview with DevX researcher Dr. Nicole Forsgren, whom he’d interviewed on the previous podcast. Her work showed that velocity was actually correlated with accuracy — meaning teams that shipped more hit their targets more often and reported lower break-fix cycles. The ability to change things quickly actually makes you more successful in a way that deliberation can’t.

Also at TripAdvisor, we had a principle called “Speed Wins”. The idea was to get products to market fast to beat your competitors, but also to make decisions quickly, pivot and move, and don’t get too tied to your own positions or ideas. That’s easier said than done in ambitious and volatile organizations.

Velocity Lessons from Creativity, Inc.: It’s About Trust

These themes come through clearly in Catmull’s telling of Pixar’s early days as well. “Fail fast” was a term coined there, along with a culture that separated people from ideas. Ideas you can criticize, tear apart, and make better. You need great people to be able to do that, and trust that bad ideas will either be jettisoned or improved by talented individuals, rather than punished by capricious managers.

If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better. —Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.

After all, teams that can make decisions and provide candid feedback without fear of political consequences are those that can ship quickly. So if you want to increase velocity, start by taking a look at your culture.

But Catmull goes on to describe, in my favorite part of the book, how new ideas are fragile. While he stops short of saying they need to be protected, he notes how easy new ideas are to kill off. There comes a time when ideas must stand-up of their own accord and face scrutiny, but they have to be given the chance to take root first.

Originality is fragile. And, in its first moments, it’s often far from pretty. —Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.

The work in early stage startups is, by definition, original. You are boldly going where no one has gone before. At Slim, we pivot our thinking on a regular basis. But our goal is always to validate new ideas with actual customers as quickly as we can. The faster we can decide whether a pivot is good or bad, the faster we move towards product-market fit and creating a great product.

So, everyone loves velocity, that’s true. But velocity without conviction is rudderless, and failing without learning is pointless. Creating the systems, culture, and learnings to generate velocity in pursuit of your mission to make your customers’ lives better is no easy task, but certainly one worth pursuing.

Quickly.