Or, how to really help your team go faster.
Speed matters in shipping products. Unfortunately, there is no single gas pedal labeled “speed to market.” Just saying “go faster” to your team shows that you lack any curiosity about why there’s a mismatch between expectations and reality. What your team heard is, “You’re lazy,” which is not a great start.
As a manager, your job is to help your team identify and ship projects that:
- Are aligned with the priorities of the business.
- Create value.
- Ship on time.
To do that, they need clarity, capacity, and a culture of shipping. Your team is probably smarter than you, but if it’s unclear to them what you’re asking them to build (and why), they won’t be able to use the skills and intelligence that you hired them for to create forward motion. If the team isn’t staffed to deliver what you’re asking them to build, they’ll get frustrated and burn out. If they don’t have the processes and tools to ship confidently and consistently, they’ll waste time on tedious tasks and get frustrated.
No organization is perfect in every dimension. In real life, stuff happens: Business priorities change two weeks after planning ends. Ad hoc requests throw off your sprints. Technical surprises stretch out your timeline. These things are out of your control, and it’s not usually obvious how to get back on track. Sometimes, the temptation is to say, “You’re all smart. You can do this. Go faster.” You might get away with that a few times if you have some goodwill capital, but you’ll erode the health of your team and the quality of their work, and things will start to unravel sooner or later.
After a while, your team will only hear, “I don’t understand what happened, and I’m not going to spend the time to find out.” That’s lazy leadership. It doesn’t create forward motion, and it burns goodwill, which you’ll have to work hard at rebuilding.
Instead, the next time there’s a crunch, and it looks like things are getting stuck in the sand, get out of the car and help push toward clarity and productivity again:
- Clarify (and re-clarify) priorities — the what and the why.
- Help them identify something they can say ‘no’ to.
- Listen to what the hard things are.
- Unblock some administrative annoyance for them. There are always annoying and distracting bureaucratic things. Make one of them go away.
- Make a useful and relevant connection for them with another team that can help out temporarily.
- If your team is understaffed for its mission, re-double your advocacy for more people.
To do these things, you must be in the car with your team and understand their challenges. Are there process or political issues? Is tech debt slowing them down? Are the technology choices sound? If you feel that you don’t understand these things well enough, you need to invest time to get there. Listen more during your 1-1’s. Add weekly check-ins with the tech lead and PM. Meet with any teams that are sources of your team’s ad hoc work and try to understand the inputs and outputs of those requests.
These are the things that will actually help your team go faster. Haste has diminishing returns. Investing in your team’s health and productivity has compounding returns.
Photo credit: preston.rhea
Martin Remy 
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