Strategic Speed: When to Accelerate and When to Pace Your Software Development

"How quickly can you get this done?"

It's a question that accompanies every new software initiative. In today's competitive landscape, the pressure to deliver software solutions rapidly is intense, especially with AI tools promising faster development. However, our 25+ years of experience have taught us how to leverage speed in software development even when it requires more nuance than simply pushing teams to work faster.

The most successful initiatives aren't always the fastest from concept to deployment—they're the ones where the product team and leadership align on how to navigate specific constraints efficiently.

Understanding different types of speed

With every project, speed is a critical success factor but it can mean different things to different stakeholders. 

Software teams often think about speed in Agile development concepts.

Development velocity measures how quickly software teams produce code or complete technical tasks. While important, this metric can be misleading in isolation.

Sustainable pace refers to the speed at which software teams can maintain quality and deliver consistently without accumulating technical debt or burning out.

While business leaders often think in terms of key performance indicators.

Time to Insight (TTI) refers to how quickly data transforms into actionable business actions. We can use this in a general sense to describe the speed at which research and analytics can inform a strategic decision.

Time to Market  (TTM) refers to the time it takes to bring a product from initial ideation to market delivery.

Time to Value (TTV) tracks how quickly an investment begins to generate tangible business returns—whether through revenue generation, cost savings, or competitive differentiation.

Alignment between product teams and business leaders around these concepts is vital to success. Prioritizing what truly matters most to the business empowers the team to make strategic decisions about speed. The challenge is how to optimize for the right type of speed that can drive business goals. As Inbal Shani, Chief Product Officer at Twilio, notes: "We are shifting from measuring speed to focusing on time to value, and that is a much better representation of return on investment."

When to prioritize maximum speed

Accelerating development in pursuit of speed should be the default priority in most scenarios:

• Capitalizing on time-sensitive market opportunities where being first creates a significant competitive advantage
• Testing business hypotheses with minimal investment through minimum viable products (MVPs)
• Responding to competitive threats where delayed response is costlier than accelerated development
• Addressing critical system failures or security vulnerabilities

When pursuing time to insight/market/value, business leaders and product teams benefit the most when they can strategically:

1. Narrow scope ruthlessly, prioritizing must-have functionality
2. Remove competing priorities for teams
3. Eliminate unnecessary approval layers while maintaining accountability
4. Accept reasonable trade-offs and risks while preserving non-negotiable quality
5. Plan for immediate post-launch refinements

For example, when fintech startup Nido Rewards approached Truefit after an initial start with an offshore development partner, their time-to-market target was in jeopardy. Our team focused the remaining priorities on completing core functionality, stability, and time to market. Some code needed rewriting and some features moved to the backlog, but we successfully brought the platform to market. We then quickly resolved post-launch refinements in scheduled iterations in pursuit of time to value.

Tactics that help your product team move faster

When outsourcing software projects, you can help your team optimize strategic decisions and tactically move faster by:

• Clarifying requirements and decision-making. Establish project leaders and communicate how key decisions will be made.
• Minimizing communication barriers. Establish consistent meeting schedules and checkpoints.
• Frontloading critical decisions. Help with consequential decisions affecting infrastructure, product strategy, and key architectural patterns.
• Establishing fast feedback loops. Provide timely responses and actionable feedback.
• Managing scope strategically. Be willing to make trade-offs to maintain momentum based on team learning and customer feedback.
• Building trust through transparency. Encourage experimentation and help teams get unstuck when needed.

Balancing speed with a more measured approach

Certain scenarios call for a more deliberate development approach such as:

• Building the foundational architecture for future capabilities
• Developing mission-critical features where failure has severe consequences
• Projects requiring significant user behavior change
• Entering regulated environments with complex compliance requirements

Signs that your project may benefit from more measured pacing include:

• High technical complexity or integration with legacy systems
• Stringent security or regulatory requirements
• Need for extensive user testing to validate usability
• Foundation-level architecture that will support future expansion
• Features where defects would significantly impact business reputation

However, even in these highly constraint-driven cases, teams can leverage speed in their approach. 

When Mitsubishi Electric chose Truefit to develop Power-I, a substation monitoring system using computer vision from cameras, robots, and drones, we balanced speed with navigating complex requirements. Having prioritized the constraints, we focused on acquiring early insights during discovery and technical R&D. These insights shaped our approach to hardware integration, data analysis, and regulatory compliance. To accelerate progress, we leveraged existing data to refine algorithms and formed an industry advisory panel for efficient R&D guidance. Early testing with market partners validated our approach, and today, Power-I is delivering value to leading U.S. power utilities.

Let’s move faster…

Speed in software development is a powerful strategic capability—one that can be precisely tuned to deliver maximum business impact. As you embark on your next software initiative, view speed as an opportunity to create a competitive advantage by:

• Identifying where rapid delivery can unlock immediate business value
• Proactively managing potential risks with thoughtful pacing
• Leveraging AI tools to accelerate design, development, and testing
• Designing flexible approaches that optimize your team's unique strengths

By treating development speed as a dynamic, strategic capability, you can transform software delivery from a technical process into a source of genuine business innovation. The most successful organizations don't just develop software—they use intelligent, adaptive development strategies to turn technology into a true competitive differentiator that drives business outcomes and growth.