Speed as a Strategy

Speed as a Strategy

How We Shipped the Savvi Beta in Just 3 Months

It’s been an exciting, lightning fast journey this past year to get Savvi where we are today. A proud moment was launching our beta product in Nov 2021 - conceived over time but built and shipped in a mere three months.

In this post, I want to share why I believe speed is critical for any successful product-led business, along with some key lessons we learned about shipping an MVP quickly. My goal is to help other startups, product teams, and founders who are in the crucial early stages.

When I say speed, what do I mean?

When I talk about speed, I mean nearly everything - team communications, launch coordination, skills gaps, and especially, decision making. Recognizing most choices are reversible helped us decide confidently and avoid analysis paralysis. Some key decisions do require careful consideration, but day-to-day product choices must be made rapidly.

It helps to recognize that most decisions we make are reversible and if we get them wrong we don’t have to live with the consequences for that long - Jeff Bezos famously called these type-2 decisions in his 1997 Shareholders letter.

Obviously, some decisions (type-1) require more care and should not be rushed for example: making sure the problem our product is solving is worthwhile pursuing.

Why this Obsession with Speed?

As Intercom CEO Des Traynor says, “Fast gets good quicker than good gets fast.” The biggest startup risk is building the wrong product. Shipping quickly, gathering user feedback, and reiterating helps mitigate this risk. Especially early on, a fast ship cadence also builds customer and investor confidence in the team’s delivery capabilities, keeping everyone positively motivated.

While fast-paced development can be stressful, we found it kept our team focused, agile, and autonomous by breaking tasks down.

Tips for Optimizing Speed

Here are some of my top tips based on our experience:

  • Embed Speed in Culture: Speed is a core value at our company, guiding our everyday actions and decisions.
  • Have a Clear Mission: Having a well-defined mission ensures everyone is focused and moving quickly towards the same goal.
  • Product Mindset Over Project Mindset: Explained neatly in this thread. Prioritize creativity and strategic thinking over just meeting deadlines. This approach keeps us focused on the bigger picture rather than just ticking off tasks.
  • Early Involvement of Product Designers: Integrating product designers from the start is crucial. They help identify valuable product ideas and create high-fidelity prototypes for user validation, streamlining our development process.
  • Simplicity in Methodologies: Avoid getting bogged down by complex methodologies. Choose a framework that works best for your team and adapt as needed.
  • Ship Timely, Not Perfectly: Emphasize launching features on time rather than waiting for perfection. This approach aligns with Gabriele Andretti's perspective: "If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough."
  • Buy, Don’t Build Non-Core Elements: In the vast SaaS landscape, leverage existing services for non-essential functions like authentication or analytics. This allows you to focus on what sets your product apart.
  • Engineering Practices for Speed: Engineers should adopt practices like trunk-based development, continuous delivery, feature flagging, utilizing higher-level cloud services, and infrastructure as code to enhance development speed.

By focusing maniacally on speed, our scrappy team was able to rapidly test assumptions and deliver an early product to market. What else can you do to ship fast?

What's next?

I’ve come across a number of great resources along the way and wanted to share some of them here for inspiration.

Interesting books:

Great talks and videos:

So what’s next for savvi?

We are hiring! Check out our current opportunities here.

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