Velocity Over Quality
Why ruthless velocity beats perfectionism in everything worth building
Most people think success is about quality.
They obsess over features, polish, perfection. They delay shipping. They add complexity. They wait for the "right time" to release.
But they're playing the wrong game entirely.
Success isn't about quality.
It's about velocity.
The hidden operating system that powers everything worth building is speed. Ruthless, uncomfortable, anxiety-inducing speed.
Systems
Look at traffic systems. America has one roundabout per 1,118 intersections.1 Why?
Traffic lights assume people need control. Explicit rules. Red means stop. Green means go. No judgment required.
Roundabouts assume people can figure shit out. They trust driver intelligence. They embrace flow.
And guess what? Roundabouts reduce fatal collisions by 90%. They're cheaper. They're more efficient.
But we stick with traffic lights. We confuse popularity with quality. We mistake familiarity for effectiveness.
This isn't just about roads.
It's about every system we build.
Shipping
After three years building software, one principle emerged supreme:
Velocity above all else.
The timeline to ship is fixed. The feature set is flexible.
This is a philosophy I’ve tried to carry over to my writing too.
You release every day, week, or month, without fail.
Not when it's perfect.
Not when it's complete.
Every. Fucking. Week.
This cadence does three critical things:
1) It delivers real feedback, not imagined scenarios
2) It reveals actual behaviors, not theoretical use cases
3) It forces ruthless prioritization, not bloat
Most teams get this backward. They fix the feature set and flex the timeline. Classic mistake. Deadly mistake.
Invisible Assumptions
The most dangerous ideas are the ones we never question.
The defaults.
The "that's just how it's done" thinking.
The invisible operating systems running silently in the background of our organizations.
Question them.
Flip them.
Test them.
The Cure
Velocity isn't just a metric.
It's the cure for organizational disease.
It's the antidote to perfectionism.
It's the vaccine against irrelevance.
When you optimize for speed, you're forced to simplify. To focus. To cut the bullshit. To build only what matters.
And in that constraint, you find freedom.
In that pressure, you find clarity.
In that rhythm, you find excellence.
Not because you aimed for excellence.
But because you aimed for velocity.
And excellence was the side effect.