Predictability Beats Speed - Especially Early On

One of the biggest mistakes I see in product teams? Optimising for speed before predictability.

Everyone wants to go faster. Launch quicker. Push more. Move at the speed of a startup. But unless you're already delivering predictably, trying to go faster is like hammering the accelerator in a car with three flat tyres.

You’re not going to win any races. You’re just going to burn out the engine.

Speed is seductive

It looks good in stand-ups. It makes investors nod. It creates the illusion of momentum. But speed without predictability is chaos wearing running shoes. It leads to missed deadlines, frayed tempers, and teams constantly scrambling to catch up.

And when things inevitably go wrong, you hear things like:

“We just need to move quicker.”
“Let’s ship it and fix later.”
“We can’t afford to slow down.”

But here’s the thing: you can’t afford not to.

Predictability builds trust

Predictable delivery is quiet. It’s not sexy. But it’s how high-performing teams earn the confidence of the business.

When you say you’ll deliver something in two weeks - and you actually do - people start to listen. Stakeholders stop hovering. Fire drills fade. Suddenly, the team gets space to think, plan, test, and improve.

It’s not about slowing down. It’s about creating the foundation you need to sustainably speed up.

Predictability is a skill, not a setting

This isn’t about playing it safe. It’s about getting good at the fundamentals:

• Planning only what you can realistically deliver

• Tracking work in one place (and sticking to it)

• Making trade-offs visible, not hidden in private Slack chats

• Saying no when things aren’t ready

• Getting the team into a rhythm they can maintain without burnout

It’s not magic. It’s not even complicated. But it does take discipline.

You can’t improve what you can’t rely on

Think of a football team. If your players are in different positions every match, if nobody knows the formation, if half the team shows up halfway through the second half - you don’t get to say “let’s work on our attacking transitions.”

You fix the basics first.

Same with product teams. If delivery is unpredictable, you're not ready for velocity, or experimentation, or scale. You need to stabilise before you optimise.

The irony?

The moment your team becomes predictable, you will start going faster - not by trying to, but because you’re not wasting energy on chaos.

Speed becomes the by-product of predictability.

That’s the switch most leaders miss.