The price of pace
Things slip out of line. Someone ends up working off an old copy of the plan. A partner team hears about a decision after it's already been made. Most weeks, some of that is on me.
I've stopped pulling senior leadership into every design decision. They still see the work. They just don't sign off on every pixel of it.
That's the price of pace. I'm the one choosing to pay it, but I'm not the only one paying. That's the part I think about most.
Roles are blurring, and honestly, I like it. I've never been good at deferring to a title for its own sake. What I trust is expertise: the person closest to the problem usually knows the most about it, whatever their title says.
I also know I'm lucky. A lot of teams at frontier companies now get to make calls in their own domain without waiting for sign-off further up the chain. Plenty of people don't have that.
So we try to use it well. We lean on today's tools to keep every partner team in the loop, so we work as one unit on what actually matters. I deliver outside my own domain and take on more than my role strictly covers, because that's what the team needs, not because it's mine to own. Sometimes that means stepping on toes to get the design across, and I'm still working out where that line is.
Pace runs on trust, and trust runs on expertise. That's what we pay with as a team: expertise, and time. What comes back is craft, delivered sooner, and wins we share.
The same team, working two ways. Gated: trust is low, so every piece of work queues behind nine checkpoints, one at a time, and maybe ships at the end. Trusted: one quick check stays open, and work ships, the team learns together, and goes again, many times over.
In my experience, what slows work down most isn't the process. It's fear: of launching, of breaking something, of being the one who got it wrong in public. Perfectionism quietly kills good work.
So I try to fail early and in the open. Switch context, pivot, break things so they can be rebuilt. It isn't comfortable. It's just cheaper than the alternative.
In 2026, pace feels like the ground everything else stands on. Big companies have started moving like small ones: they shift, pivot, test, break, scrap and rebuild. Working next to AI that moves this fast has made time under pressure worth more than it used to be.
For us, pace beats polish. Experimenting at pace is how we find out what will work: test sooner, pivot sooner, take the small wins together and keep the losses small.
I don't think this way of working suits everyone, and it doesn't have to. It suits people who'd rather bend than break, and who feel a kind of anxious excitement about not knowing what's next. I'm one of them.
Everything comes with a price. I'm willing to pay this one, as long as it keeps getting us somewhere.
Because for me, pace is meaning. It's joy, challenge, development and growth.