Former CEO I worked under used to love saying: “Be fast or be perfect. And since no one’s perfect, you better be fast.” Sounds cool until you realize it was just a free pass to skip code reviews, bypass security controls, and YOLO prod deployments. “Speed” became a shield to ignore due diligence. PRs got rushed, on-call was a tire fire, and postmortems turned into recurring meetings with new names.
My favorite part was engineers asking for admin access “to move faster.” (Spoiler: they didn’t need it)
The real issue was that we weren’t a scrappy startup anymore. We were playing enterprise dress-up with a startup mindset. Speed was costing us everything from tech debt to fragility, rework, and burnout. Then I changed jobs and landed back in actual startup mode. Heard the same “move fast” mantra again. But this time, it clicked differently. Because here’s the thing: you can move fast without lighting your future self on fire. Good teams know when to slam the brakes, take a breath, and make decisions that won’t age like milk. Move fast, sure—but maybe don’t bulldoze the foundation while you’re at it.