Slow Down to Go Fast
Velocity is a simple concept at face value: distance per time. The last time you probably thought about velocity was while you were behind the wheel, because driving a vehicle requires you to actively manage your speed. Luckily, managing speed while driving is simple–a little more gas to speed up, a little less gas to slow down, brake to slow down quickly or stop. But as any software engineer worth their weight can tell you, applying that same approach to building software won’t get the same results.
When it comes to collaborating with a team to build software, velocity is extremely counterintuitive. Redlining towards a deadline can take many forms (pushing people to work longer hours with diminishing returns, cutting corners on QA to squeeze more in, etc), but the results are always the same: more drag than boost. So how then do you tune a tech team to optimize for velocity? Look no further than the wisdom of the tortoise & the hare. Much like with the tortoise, in software slow is smooth, smooth is steady, and steady is fast. That’s right folks, the secret to going fast in software is to slow down.
Abraham Lincoln said if he had 5 minutes to chop down a tree he’d spend 3 sharpening the axe. Translating that for software engineering means spending less time coding and more time thinking. I’m talking about several hours per day spent outside your text editor modeling what needs to be built and how the pieces will fit together. Investing the time to think through the implementation details before building will greatly improve the productivity of the hours you do spend coding (results may vary but ~2–3x boost is common). This can be difficult to do, especially in engineering cultures where individual contributors always start in their text editors or where managers are skeptical of the ROI from less coding and more planning, but I assure you it works!
If you want to build things quickly, slow down to go fast.
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