From Vanity Velocity to Real Impact: A Guide for Product Teams
These counterintuitive strategies and working habits are sustainable and surprisingly effective at delivering value.
Product teams often fall into the trap of looking busy rather than delivering real value. It’s easy to mistake activity for progress — to think that moving fast is the same as making an impact. But the reality is, many of the things that feel like speed actually create friction, inefficiency, and technical debt.
This guide will help teams shift from fake velocity (doing more, faster) to real impact (delivering value, efficiently).
Stop Celebrating Starting. Start Celebrating Finishing.
❌ Fake Speed: Kicking off multiple projects, constantly adding new tasks.
✅ Real Speed: Prioritizing completion before moving on.
Why does this matter?
While starting work on something new and shiny can feel like fun, it quickly turns to being just another unfinished project. A half-done project delivers zero value. High Work In Progress (WIP) slows everything down, creating bottlenecks and cognitive overload. Reduce WIP, focus on completing work, and unlock actual progress.
Pace Yourself. It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint.
❌ Fake Speed: Jam-packing schedules, eliminating downtime.
✅ Real Speed: Leaving breathing room for reflection, problem-solving, and course correction.
Why does this matter?
Tightly packed schedules lead to reactive work instead of thoughtful execution. Slack time enables better decision-making, improves collaboration, and prevents burnout.
Work Sequentially, Not in Chaos.
❌ Fake Speed: Parallelizing work streams, thinking “more in progress = more progress.”
✅ Real Speed: Serializing work to maintain focus and reduce rework.
Why does this matter?
Do one thing at a time. Start together, stay together, and finish together. Parallel work creates dependencies, bottlenecks, and confusion. By tackling work sequentially, teams ensure quality, alignment, and sustainable progress.
Optimize for Impact, Not Just Output.
❌ Fake Speed: Chasing efficiency, maximizing output, increasing ticket velocity.
✅ Real Speed: Measuring impact is measured as how quickly value reaches users.
Why does this matter?
Delivering one well-executed feature is better than launching ten half-baked ones. Most teams are busy creating stuff (components, mockups, wireframes, etc.) but very few are shipping value to the customer. Align work with clear business objectives and user outcomes, not just speed.
Small Batches Win. Big Batches Kill Speed.
❌ Fake Speed: Shipping large, complex releases to reduce resets.
✅ Real Speed: Shipping smaller batches for faster learning and iteration.
Why does this matter?
Big batches create risk, increase cycle time, and slow feedback loops. Smaller releases keep teams nimble and responsive. Smaller scopes, executed in small timeboxes, creates the environment in which you can build one thing at at time, but still ship a lot of value.
Invest in Behavior and Tooling, Not Just Headcount.
❌ Fake Speed: Hiring more people to “go faster.”
✅ Real Speed: Strengthening infrastructure, automation, and quality tools.
Why does this matter?
Adding people to a broken process doesn’t fix the problem — it makes it worse. Investing in automation, design systems, and AI-assisted workflows eliminates bottlenecks without ballooning team size.
Swarm the Blockers, Don’t Work Around Them.
❌ Fake Speed: Finding temporary workarounds to keep moving.
✅ Real Speed: Swarming the blocker as a team to fix the root cause.
Why does this matter?
Workarounds pile up technical debt. Tackling problems head-on prevents long-term slowdowns.
Design & Build Together, Not in Silos.
❌ Fake Speed: “Design first, then throw it over the fence to engineers.”
✅ Real Speed: Participatory design — UX and dev working together from the start.
Why does this matter?
When designers and engineers collaborate early, the team avoids rework, misalignment, and inefficient handoffs.
Measure Team Health, Not Just Performance.
❌ Fake Speed: Keeping everyone “heads down,” driving constant output.
✅ Real Speed: Balancing focused work and collaboration to sustain long-term impact.
Why does this matter?
Burnout destroys velocity. Sustainable, healthy teams work smarter, not harder. Remember, pace yourself and your teams. Product work is a marathon, not a sprint.
Make Stakeholders Partners, Not Reviewers.
❌ Fake Speed: Presenting work for stakeholder approval late in the process.
✅ Real Speed: Bringing stakeholders into the trenches for real-time participation.
Why does this matter?
The sooner you involve stakeholders the better. Interviewing them and gathering their opinions early on, and including them as often as possible for updates and checkins will cost you less than waiting for a late-stage approval, which inevitably introduces costly rework. Early alignment ensures smoother execution.
