In the fast-paced world of software development, teams often prioritize speed, especially during the early stages of product development. Startups and established organizations alike feel the pressure to deliver customer value quickly, maintain a competitive advantage in emerging markets, and meet business-critical deadlines. This drive to “move fast and break things” frequently leads to scrappy development practices—building fast with little planning, delaying technical debt. While this approach can offer short-term advantages, such as rapid market entry and early user feedback, it often incurs significant long-term costs and has profound adverse societal consequences [1]. Many organizations were able to bear these long-term costs by hiding behind operations, expanding teams, and slowing down later in the process. However, this raises the question of whether such an approach is universally effective.
Is Speed Bad?
No. More importantly, it’s not a question of whether it’s good or bad—it’s absolutely necessary. Speed can mean life or death for startups and smaller companies, while for larger organizations, it prevents stalled growth or missed opportunities. No organization wants to fall behind. Speed drives growth, and growth triumphs all [2] and growth delivers higher returns, predicts long-term success, and more.
Then Why Not Speed?
Building software for a single machine is easy, but when you scale, that’s when things get real. Once something works, customers and product teams demand more features—and they want them available yesterday. One report analyzed over 1,200 tech company post-mortems (from 2019 to 2023) and found that 38% of software startups failed due to “inability to scale fast enough” or “slow market response” [3]. Beyond competition and funding shortages, a key culprit is operational bottlenecks. When you build fast with tons of tech debt, it’s a party in the front and chaos in the back.
How Does It Fail Us in the Long Term?
As software scales with tiny tech debts or shortcuts for speed, it’s like death by a thousand cuts. It backfires big time—teams get stuck working on operations with no time for new development, so you end up hiring more people to keep up. Teams lose confidence to push changes to production because the system’s so fragile it slows everything down, especially when you tweak something and don’t know what else will break. People get frustrated and leave. It messes with the organization’s agility, customer experience, and developer experience. After a while, we just call those systems legacy and start plotting replacements.
What Is the Middle Ground?
Speed in the early stage is absolutely necessary but shouldn’t mean shortcuts. Spend a bit more time on long-term architecture, set up solid code quality standards and enforce it strictly, and build a proper developer environment where testing happens in advance so you can iterate faster. Speed here isn’t just growth—it’s technological agility. One software market trends report shows fast-moving organizations adopting AI and cloud tech have a 50% higher retention rate with enterprise clients compared to slow adopters [4].
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, said in an interview [5], “Well, great engineering and speed and iteration are actually two different values. They’re not necessarily at odds, but I think there are a lot of great engineering organizations that try to build things that are super high quality and have good competence around that. But there’s a certain personality that goes with taking your stuff and putting it out there before it’s fully polished”.
It might have worked for Meta because of its strong foundational infrastructure. It’s one thing if your product isn’t fully polished, but it’s a whole different ballgame if your foundational technologies aren’t. That latter one has serious consequences. Big players like Meta might be able to pause some of the feature development for a year or more—like they did in 2012 [5]—to get back on track, but in this day and age, almost no company can afford that.
Call to Action
- Software projects are always underestimated. Don’t be a hero and estimate aggressively. Something always comes up, so give some buffer in the estimates.
- Invest in testing environments and keep them working as the system grows; it tremendously increases the development velocity by enabling faster iteration.
- Establish baseline code and documentation quality guidelines and strictly enforce them.
- Don’t just keep solving operational issues as they come up and create the illusion that more issues are solved; fix the root cause instead.
- Push back on feature delivery and ask for more time if the pace negatively impacts your foundational systems.
- Software grows and lives longer, but people come and go. Keep educating the team and emphasize the importance of maintaining quality and building things right.
Conclusion
In the software industry, not speeding kills. Yet racing ahead with shortcuts in foundational tech, quality controls, and engineering excellence can crash just as fast. Small startups fight to survive, big players chase exponential growth—but a shaky foundation threatens both. If an organization manages to survive with a weak foundation and poor engineering quality, it risks collapse when attempting to scale or may grind to a halt. Beyond that, it creates numerous people-related issues—lowering team morale and leading to operational burnout—which can collectively become very costly. Organizations must move quickly, but sometimes we need to say “NO,” pause to strengthen the foundation and quality, educate and then continue growing sustainably. Speed wins battles; smart speed wins the war.
References
[1] “Software Development: Speed vs. Sustainability” – ACM Digital Library,
[2] “Grow fast or die slow” – McKinsey & Company,
[3] “483 Startup Failure Post-Mortems” – CB Insights,
[4] “2024 Software Market Trends” – Gartner (Note: Exact URL not provided in original; placeholder used:
[5] https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/the-mark-zuckerberg-interview
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and not their employers.
