If one thing is broadly true about humans (and indeed most animals), it’s that we tend to do what has worked for us in the past. This, of course, sets us up for the journey of failure and disappointment known as “growth”—just ask any toddler.
As companies grow, they also tend to do what has worked in the past, and can find themselves just as caught off guard as any toddler mastering basic motor skills. Early in a company’s existence, when the goal is to create a sustainable revenue stream before your investment runs out, speed of delivery has existential consequences—especially with pure digital offerings.
But the lesson companies sometimes take away from these early days is that speed is always paramount, creating a dangerous addiction to processes and priorities that the organization has simply outgrown, as Neon CDO Koji Pereira described in conversation with me and Peter on the latest episode of our design leadership podcast Finding Our Way. “It just becomes part of their DNA,” he says. “It’s hard to change that once established.”
For design leaders, it can be a hard truth to face: The business will always want the work finished faster than you can deliver it. In fact, that long-held suspicion quietly whispering in the back of your mind is probably correct: they’d much rather be doing this without you. If design could be a zero-dollar outlay with zero time impact on delivery and achieve the same results, they’d take it every time. They’re only working with you because they have to.
And sometimes, they might need reminding of why they have to. Why a product development team with a fixation on speed that has them forever chasing their next hit of delivery could end up high on their own supply and shipping a lot while impacting nothing for users or the business.
What gets lost in this speed-freak culture is the idea that speed may constitute a tradeoff with other outcomes desirable to the business. The design leader, more than any other player in the mix here, must be the one to speak to those tradeoffs—and frame them in ways that can be heard beyond the design team.
Driving organizational maturity means driving the leadership’s collective ability to recognize when speed is not the right move. As with breaking any addiction, the addict can’t change if they don’t really want to. But to want that change, they must first see what the addiction is costing them.
Jesse James Garrett 