The Need for Speed: How Startups Can Improve Product Velocity

1. Hire for Pace, Not Pedigree

Early-stage product development is fast-paced, ambiguous, and often chaotic. You’re shipping before everything’s polished, making decisions with incomplete information, and constantly reprioritizing as new data comes in. This environment isn’t for everyone—and that’s okay.

Some of the highest-velocity teams I’ve seen are made up of people with relatively unglamorous CVs—folks who’ve bounced between scrappy startups rather than climbing the ladder at Big Tech. But these people have something far more valuable: bias toward action. They’re comfortable with ambiguity, capable of making progress without perfect clarity, and don’t get paralysed by the pursuit of perfection.

These are builders who understand that in the early stages, “perfect is the enemy of shipped.” They know how to deliver 80% of the value in 20% of the time—and they don’t fall into the trap of gold-plating every detail. They work fast, but not carelessly.

2. Work Smarter, Not Harder

In a world of no-code platforms, AI copilots, prebuilt UI kits, open-source libraries, and public APIs, there’s no reason to build everything from scratch. Yet many teams still default to custom development for everything—either out of habit, ego, or a misplaced desire for control.

It’s a hard truth, but at this stage, your customers don’t care about how elegant your backend architecture is or whether your codebase is built for infinite scale. They care whether your product solves a meaningful problem now.

Startups that move fast embrace smart assembly over custom invention. That means using off-the-shelf tools, leveraging open APIs, and knowing when “good enough” is actually the best answer. Hire people who are not only fluent in their craft but also pragmatic—people who understand when to code, when to integrate, and when to just duct-tape it together and move on.

3. Stop Changing the Roadmap Every Week

This one’s for the founders.

You’re full of ideas. That’s a feature, not a bug. But if your team is constantly chasing your latest brainwave, they’ll never gain traction. Every time you reprioritise, it doesn’t just change direction—it erodes momentum and undermines trust in the process.

Velocity thrives on clarity. Your team needs a stable roadmap, even if it’s just for the next two weeks. That doesn’t mean you can’t adapt—but it does mean you should treat changes as serious events, not whims. Your roadmap is not a backlog of ideas to reshuffle at will—it’s a series of commitments that give your team focus and confidence.

In early-stage companies, discipline around prioritisation is one of the fastest ways to build speed.

4. Protect Maker Time

Designers, developers, and product thinkers do their best work in deep focus. When they have long, uninterrupted stretches of time, they can get into flow, solve complex problems, and make meaningful progress. But when their calendars are filled with context-switching meetings or when they’re expected to respond to messages in real time, velocity grinds to a halt.

Paul Graham’s classic piece on Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule outlines this perfectly. Founders and PMs tend to operate in 30-minute blocks. Makers need three-hour chunks. If you want velocity, you need to respect that difference.

Some teams batch all meetings into Monday and Friday. Others, like Basecamp, famously banned internal messaging in the mornings to give the team focused delivery time. Whatever model you choose, protect those deep work hours like your growth depends on it—because it does.

5. Limit Work in Progress

One of the biggest killers of speed is trying to do too much at once.

When teams juggle multiple features in parallel, context-switching kicks in, mental overhead increases, and work drags on. Nothing quite gets finished. Quality drops. Everyone feels busy, but progress is illusory.

Velocity doesn’t come from multitasking. It comes from focused execution. Pick fewer priorities. Limit work in progress (WIP). Use Kanban to visualise and constrain flow. Focus on getting a small number of things over the line—and then move on to the next.

Ironically, the fastest teams are often the ones doing the least at any given moment.

6. Pick a Process Built for Speed—and Stick With It

Your product process should enable momentum, not stifle it. But too many teams overcomplicate their workflows with excessive rituals, constant switching between tools, or over-engineered ceremonies.

Early on, you don’t need Agile™ in its full enterprise form. You need something lightweight, flexible, and fast.

Two processes I often recommend for early teams:

• Kanban: A continuous flow model that lets you pull in work as capacity frees up. Great for limiting WIP and moving quickly without the artificial structure of sprints.

• Shape Up: A process from Basecamp that defines fixed time windows (typically six weeks) for work, without locking in exact scopes. It prioritises appetite over ambition and gives teams room to explore without constant micromanagement.

Whatever you choose, stick with it. Constantly switching processes, tools, or rituals creates friction and confusion. Pick something simple, align the team, and let it run.

7. Velocity Isn’t Just About Speed—It’s About Direction

Fast is meaningless if you’re headed the wrong way.

True product velocity is about shipping things that matter. That means grounding your roadmap in real user needs, not founder intuition. It means doing discovery work, talking to customers, and framing problems—not just brainstorming features.

One of the most effective ways to improve velocity is to align your team around a clear metric. For example: increase activation by 15%, or reduce onboarding drop-off. When teams focus on solving a specific problem, they’re more likely to experiment, learn, and adapt—rather than robotically executing backlog items.

And once you ship something, don’t just high-five and move on. Measure its impact. Did it work? Did it move the needle? If not, iterate. Learning is what turns motion into momentum.

Bonus: Actually Run Retros

Plenty of teams say they’re Agile—but ignore one of its most valuable practices: the retrospective.

Retros are a structured opportunity to reflect on how the team is working and how it can improve. When done well, they’re a powerful lever for continuous improvement.

A personal favourite? The Speedboat exercise. Teams identify anchors (things slowing them down) and engines (things propelling them forward). It’s a great way to surface small process improvements that compound over time.

If your team is reflecting every 2–3 weeks on how to move faster, better, and more effectively, speed becomes part of your culture—not just an aspiration.

Final Thought

Product velocity isn’t about chaos, hustle, or brute force. It’s about building the right environment for momentum to emerge.

✅ Hire pragmatic builders who default to action
✅ Set clear priorities and stick to them
✅ Protect deep work and reduce noise
✅ Use tools and frameworks that speed things up
✅ Focus on outcomes, not outputs

In the early days of a startup, time is your most precious resource. The way you move through it can define your trajectory. Get the fundamentals right, and speed becomes a natural byproduct—not a constant struggle.