We’ve all felt that pressure from leadership: “We need to increase our velocity!” The push to ship faster is relentless. But what if our obsession with speed is just an illusion, a vanity metric that’s leading us straight into building a product nobody wants?
When teams prioritize speed above all else, they start measuring success by story points and cycle times, not customer outcomes. This is the classic feature factory trap. We get really good at building the wrong things efficiently. We push discovery and user research to the side, labeling them as “nice-to-haves” that slow us down. In reality, skipping this crucial learning phase is the slowest thing you can do—it just sends you sprinting in the wrong direction.
The antidote isn’t to stop moving; it’s to slow down to speed up. By embedding continuous discovery into our sprints, we ensure we’re always validating assumptions and building on a foundation of real user needs. Getting cross-functional alignment on this mindset shift is key. Tools that centralize user insights and connect them transparently to roadmap decisions, like those we’re building at https://leera.io, can make this process less of a battle and more of a shared mission.
This approach trades the illusion of speed for the reality of impact.
How do you balance the leadership pressure for velocity with the critical need for meaningful discovery in your organization?