Speed vs velocity
How do you measure your success as a product manager? In my experience, “speed” is one of the most common ways—in fact, someone I know was fired for being “too slow to ship.” Yes, you can’t create value if you don’t ship anything, but more often than not, speed isn’t the issue. In fact, evaluating PMs for how “fast” their team moves can have pretty negative side effects.
Instead of speed, we should think about velocity. Velocity has speed and direction. “How fast are we moving _in a certain direction?” _is a much better way to evaluate the pace of a product team. Moving fast with no direction won’t result in success. Most products don’t fail because they didn’t move fast enough; they fail because they built the wrong thing.
“If you go speedily in the wrong direction, you will end up in the wrong place.”
In the plot above, each of the vectors represents a project or feature. The magnitude of the vectors could be considered “speed”: it is how quickly / how much progress was made towards that particular feature’s goals and KPIs. Even though the plot on the right has smaller magnitudes (i.e. less “speed”), the net effect is much closer to the goal. Direction matters. It shouldn’t be surprising that shipping features willy-nilly without a clear product direction won’t result in success, but even so, it seems pretty common for teams to obsess about speed.
I joined a team that had almost exclusively focused on speed. Before I joined, they tried a lot of different things in a short period of time and they were able to launch new features at a record setting pace. But it was not clear why their product existed. There was no vision for where the product was headed, there wasn’t suitable analytics in place, the deployment CI/CD pipeline was a mess, there were A/B tests left running in various states… There were some big changes we needed to make to make sure we could provide value to our customers and our business. But when the team was lauded for their speed and encouraged to “move faster”, there was no incentive to slow down and focus on the things that mattered most.
From @shreyas