Nov 19, 2024 · 5 min read
We've all felt it. You have a clear strategy, a capable team, and important problems to solve for your customers. Yet, actually getting valuable product updates out the door feels slower than it should. Features get stuck, decisions linger, and the momentum stalls. This is especially frustrating in complex domains, where the technical challenges are already high.
Why does this happen? Often, it's not a single big issue, but a collection of smaller, everyday patterns and habits that accumulate friction and slow things down. Recognizing these patterns is the first step to breaking free. Here are a few common ones I've seen crop up repeatedly.
In many organizations, getting something shipped involves a series of handoffs: Product defines it, Design mocks it up, Engineering builds it, QA tests it, maybe Ops deploys it. Each handoff point is a potential delay.
In B2B, the need for careful checks is real. But when the process relies too heavily on sequential handoffs between siloed teams, latency builds up fast. A small delay waiting for feedback, plus another waiting for resources, plus another for a final review, can turn a week's worth of work into a month's wait.
How does information flow in your team? How are decisions made?
When communication defaults to synchronous meetings or requires actively pushing status reports, it creates bottlenecks. People wait for information or decisions, and the cost of keeping everyone "aligned" through meetings and updates eats into actual building time.
Who actually owns solving a specific customer problem or improving a key metric? What happens when that problem crosses team boundaries?
Without clear, accountable owners for specific outcomes, and the flexibility to adjust team structures as needed, important work gets stuck behind organizational lines.
This is a classic B2B tension. Sales teams are closing vital deals, often involving specific feature requests or customization commitments.
While serving customers is critical, letting individual sales deals consistently dictate the product roadmap leads to a reactive development cycle, technical debt, and slows down progress on core platform improvements that benefit everyone.
In B2B, quality, reliability, and security are non-negotiable. No one wants to ship a buggy or half-baked feature to an enterprise client. But this can sometimes morph into a fear of shipping anything that isn't "perfect."
Striving for excellence is good, but waiting for perfection is often a hidden form of delay. Finding the right balance between quality standards and the speed needed to learn and iterate is crucial, but difficult.
There's no magic bullet, but counteracting these slowdowns often involves shifting towards principles like:
Speed isn't about cutting corners, especially in B2B. It's about relentlessly identifying and removing the friction that slows down the delivery of real value to customers. These patterns – handoff chains, information silos, fuzzy ownership, roadmap conflicts, and perfectionism paralysis – are common because they often emerge organically as companies grow. Actively recognizing them and consciously working to counteract them is key to building and maintaining momentum. It requires deliberate effort and a willingness to change how teams work together.