It probably started with a spark of inspiration, a problem you knew how to solve or a tool you wanted that didn’t exist yet. You got the funding, hired a team, and built the core of your vision. It worked, and it felt great.
As you used your own product, the ideas kept flowing. With each sprint, the feature list grew. You landed your first clients, then ten more, who came to rely on your product for their daily operations. Your company was growing, and by all metrics, you were succeeding.
But then, a subtle shift began.
What started as a couple of minor bugs a month turned into a flood of serious problems each week. Your team, once focused on innovation, is now caught in a relentless cycle of firefighting. You’re no longer building; you’re just duct taping, patching one leak while another bursts. The codebase, once clean, is now a patchwork of solutions piled on a shaky foundation.
If you’re constantly fighting fires, something is wrong with your foundation. The constant pressure to “ship fast, break things” ignores a critical truth: breaking too much, too often, breaks trust.
The Leadership Blind Spot
Too often, leaders see development velocity as the primary metric of success. They see a growing feature list, not the invisible cost of a fragile product. This is the leadership blind spot: a failure to recognize that technical debt, just like financial debt, compounds over time. Each “quick fix” is another layer of duct tape, making the next feature even harder and riskier to implement.
The uncomfortable answer is as simple as it is terrifying: Stop.
Intentionally slowing down can feel like failure, but shipping fast is worthless if you’re shipping a frustrating experience. It’s time to take a step back and fix what’s broken.
The Solution: Slow Down to Speed Up
Slowing down isn’t about giving up on progress, it’s about trading short-term feature output for long-term health. Here’s how:
- Acknowledge the Debt. Have an honest conversation with your development lead. Ask for a candid assessment of the codebase. Recognizing that code needs maintenance to remain healthy isn’t about blame, it’s about treating your codebase seriously.
- Prioritize Refactoring. Dedicate significant, planned time to rebuilding and improving old features. What was a brilliant solution two years ago might be a bottleneck today. Giving your team the space to refactor and modernize the core of your product is an investment in future speed and stability.
- Shift the Mindset. Your job as a leader or influential engineer is to make the invisible cost of fragility visible. True progress isn’t just a longer feature list, it’s a stronger, more reliable product. True leadership is recognizing when to slow down to ultimately speed up.
The Takeaway
Don’t let your vision get buried under a mountain of quick fixes and half-finished features. It’s time to shift our perspective:
- Build a product you would actually want to use. If you’re secretly frustrated by the same minor glitches your customers complain about, the user experience is suffering.
- Prioritize polish over short-term profit. A stable, enjoyable product leads to higher customer retention and builds a brand people trust. This is more valuable than any single feature.
- Address technical debt proactively. Slowing down to fix what’s broken prevents the endless cycle of firefighting and preserves your product’s long-term health.
Have the courage to slow down, fix what’s broken, and build a foundation that’s ready for the future. Build a product that doesn’t just work, but feels great.