The Two Futures of Software: Fast and Cheap vs. Painstakingly Good

In 1950s post-war America, an advertising executive named Rosser Reeves proposed a simple formula: you could have it fast, cheap, or good — but only two at a time. This “Project Management Triangle” quickly became corporate gospel, the kind of phrase you’d find taped to the side of a developer’s monitor or printed on a mug in a product manager’s cupboard. It was neat. It was true. And like most good slogans, it masked a deeper, more complex story.

Fast forward to 2025 and the triangle feels… off.

Today, in software startups, “fast” and “cheap” are no longer opposites. They’re twins. In a world of cloud platforms, no-code tools, and GitHub Copilot, the marginal cost of building software has collapsed. Time and money have become nearly interchangeable. Spin up an AWS instance, grab a React template, plug in Stripe, and your MVP is live before the coffee goes cold.

But what about “good”?

This is where things get murky — and interesting.

Because "good" used to mean reliable. Stable. Secure. Now, good means loved. It means customers actually want to use the thing. Not just that it works, but that it works for them — intuitively, beautifully, memorably. And building that kind of good? That still takes time. A lot of time.

So the real choice modern companies face is no longer between three competing values. It’s between two competing futures:

The Fast & Cheap Future — Launch early, iterate fast, collect feedback, ship more. You aim for 80% good enough, then leapfrog with features and fend off competition with sheer momentum. This is the future of blitzscaling, A/B tests, and shipping five versions before lunch.
The Deliberate Future — Move slowly, refine relentlessly, obsess over every detail. You sweat the onboarding flow. You craft your microcopy. You care about the emotional tone of your error states. This is the future of “it just works” — of Apple circa 2007 or Figma’s silky UI.

It’s tempting to think this is just a matter of taste. Some founders prefer speed. Others quality. Horses for courses, right?

Not quite.

Because the economics of software bias us strongly toward the first option. If you can release a product in a tenth the time, at a tenth the cost, and maybe dominate the market before your more principled rival even exits beta… why wouldn’t you?

This is where the Pareto Principle comes in — the old idea that 80% of value comes from 20% of effort. Most product teams live and die by this rule. They get to "good enough" and stop. Why spend another six months refining the edge cases of one feature when you could launch four new ones instead? Why perfect the feel of a scroll animation when the roadmap is stacked with big, bold bets?

And yet… some companies do choose the slower path.

Consider Notion. When it first launched, it looked like a design student’s final project — precise, elegant, almost too polished. It took them years to build a product that felt effortless. Or take Superhuman, which famously refused to open up signups until users consistently reported being delighted. Both were ridiculed at the time. Both now have cult-like followings and are impossible to copy.

It’s easy to dismiss these companies as outliers. But they hint at a deeper truth: there are no shortcuts to delight. While speed might win the first round, experience often wins the war.

The irony is, the “fast and cheap” companies often come back to invest in quality — but only once they’ve already scaled. They hire brand designers. They refactor spaghetti code. They rewrite onboarding flows. It’s as if, having sprinted ahead, they finally look around and realize they’ve built a city on sand.

So the real question is one of timing and values.

Do you prioritize momentum, or trust in craft?

Do you race to dominate, knowing you’ll clean up later?

Or do you build something so considered, so undeniably good, that customers forgive your slowness — and never leave?

Most startups, understandably, choose speed. But the few that don’t? They’re not just building products. They’re building trust.

And in the long run, that may be the most expensive — and most valuable — choice of all.