14 practical tips for making you and your tech team faster

At Torre, our purpose is to offer great services that make work fulfilling, and many things contribute to achieving this end. One of them is speed. I recently compiled a list of practical tips for improving speed and then shared it internally. The reaction was so positive, we thought we should share the list publicly because others may find it useful. If you have additional tips, please share them with us!

From small to large organizations, speed is a key factor in reaching the desired goal: The Lean Startup and Design Sprint are all about fast iterations. For Mike Cassidy, speed has been a key strategy in making his four companies successful.

Jeff Bezos recently wrote: “[We are] determined to keep our decision-making velocity high […] Speed matters in business — plus a high-velocity decision-making environment is more fun too.”

Speed is not only about execution. Speed is also about decision-making, learning, and adapting. For example, a few years ago while I was leading LetMeGo, I pushed my team to execute fast, and they did. Unfortunately, I was quite slow at learning what potential users wanted. It took me three years to run my first desirability tests. This mistake almost cost Tania Zapata, Leonardo Suárez, and me $3,000,000.

Here are some tips I’ve compiled for improving your speed as well as the speed of your team:

• Separate introspection from execution. There should be a period of thinking, questioning, and determining strategy. Then, there should be another period for the execution of that strategy.
• Make decisions with limited information. Jeff Bezos thinks that “most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90% — in most cases — you’re probably being slow.”
• Have an algorithm for prioritization. Try to tackle the most important challenges instead of all the challenges.
• Avoid dependencies. Dependencies add cognitive load on both you and others. Give and request as much autonomy as you can.
• Avoid unnecessary bureaucracy. Sometimes bureaucracy is good, sometimes it is bad. Always ask yourself if the process you’re following makes sense.
• Make objectives explicit. Write them down. Clarify milestones and deliverables before you start executing.
• Surround yourself with fast people. The slowest person on a team — the lowest common denominator — determines the speed of the entire group.
• Hire fast, fire fast. The pace of the hiring process will set expectations for new recruits. If you need to fire a person, do it quickly. As Ben Horowitz writes: “I have never fired anyone too early.”
• Keep your team small (where possible). The larger a team is, the more time it will take for each of its members to communicate with others. Also, the larger the group, the lower the sense of responsibility. The fastest team is a team of one. As the team grows, the speed (per capita) decreases.
• Be disciplined. Discipline makes us predictable, and being predictable reduces the cognitive load on the people around us because they know what to expect from us.
• Be pragmatic. Life is too short to repeat the mistakes of others. When exploring the unknown, stick to using tools that are well known. This will reduce your uncertainty.
• Plan for speed in the long term. Some shortcuts will make you faster in the short term, but slower in the long term. If there is high probability that your current efforts will have a long-term effect, avoid taking such shortcuts.
• Speed doesn’t come at the expense of quality. Low quality adds uncertainty to the results of your efforts. Did they fail because the idea was bad or because of the quality of the execution was poor? Find a balance between speed and quality.
• Be entrepreneurial. You’re the CEO of your projects.

What can you do next?

1. Answer this question: Is there something that could make you faster when making decisions, executing, learning, or adapting?
2. Then act on it and ask for help if you need it.

Abe Duarte, Chief of Bunny Inc., one of our business units, added this thoughtful comment to the original post:

About limited information. I think Bezos’ approach is correct but I’ve seen some articles recently where the concept of complete information is mixed with that of certainty. This is a huge mistake.

Certainty: What the chances are of success. A probability of 50% means your decision can go either way, it’s like tossing a coin. So having a 60% chance of success is not a very good number, 75% is halfway between not knowing the outcome and being sure of an outcome.

Incomplete information: Having incomplete information is something else. You have data that claims you are 90% correct; the problem is that you only have half of the data you’d like to have. It is a very different situation, but equally dangerous since the missing data can swing your certainty the other way around.

In markets and economics, incomplete information is a very common — albeit interesting — problem. It’s effect on markets has also been studied in depth; someone even won a Nobel Prize for it: The Market for Lemons. In practical terms, though, what it means is that, as a leader, you need to have an indication that you possess the most important pieces of information.

Thanks to Abe Duarte, Amaury Prieto, Carel Cronje, and Santiago Jaramillo for reading and commenting on drafts of this article.