All I hear these days is we need to go faster. I get it. AI is certainly making it possible to do more. I have multiple agents running in the background right now doing more than I could have ever possibly done before. And with everyone roughly unlocking these new AI super powers in unison, there's a ton of pressure to keep up, to speed up, to deliver more, to just say yes or get left behind.

But I'm from the camp of less is more. Where the hard part isn't what you can do. The hard part is choosing what to do. Where the best products aren't the ones that try to do a little bit of everything. The best products are the ones that intentionally focus on a few things and do those things exceedingly well. Is it possible to have both now? Speed and quality?

I stumbled upon this post Design is Dead. It’s All Evolution Now and it really stuck with me. "There was a time when products were designed with intent. Sections were organized into a hierarchy, features were given logical places. You could feel a system behind the product". That feels antiquated. That's not how teams operate these days. It's hundreds of small changes, keep the winners, roll back the losers. The result isn't an intentional product. It's an accumulation.

Maybe that's better? Evolution has gotten us pretty far.

But, then again, that was over billions of years. The half-life of the software industry is only 5 years.

I think about this a lot. A few things I keep coming back to:

If you don't know where you're going, you can't get there faster

When everyone on the team has a shared vision, a clear picture of what you're building and why, you can move fast with confidence. A lot of the best product people on Lenny's Podcast talk about importance of taste, of judgement in the new world. If the cost of building goes to zero, the critical thing is knowing what to build and why we're building it. In these speed conversations, I wish I heard people talking just as much about the destination part.

Asking where we're headed is not the same as pumping the brakes ##

The people asking "wait, what are we actually building?" probably aren't the ones slowing things down. On the contrary. They're the ones trying to make sure all this energy and speed is getting us somewhere. If asking "where are we heading?" is treated as a burden, that's a worrying sign. It means everyone is running in different directions. Direction doesn't need to be a 3-month vision exercise. A day or two to sketch the destination and pressure-test can be more than enough.

More is not the same as better ##

Shipping more doesn't necessarily mean a better product. Don't conflate the two. I think a lot about the limits of people's ability to adapt to change. There's a real question of how many new features actually get traction, and how quickly people can absorb them. Pick your favorite app. I'm sure it has dozens of features you've never used. Now imagine they add 10 new features every week... Speed focused on a few things you really want to make amazing will always beat speed spread thin across everything.

One caveat to all of this: if you have a clear destination, and you know what you want to build, but you've just been resource constrained, then by all means go go go. Get to your destination 10x faster.