Why Speed (and any other positive adjective) is Terrible as a company value
By: Stephen Beeson
Tags: Management And Leadership, Software Development

Creating company values can be a step towards creating a company culture that aligns with the desires of the company leaders. They can also create confusion and are often ignored.

When done well, they provide a guide for people at all levels of a company to make decisions that the company directors themselves might make. When chosen poorly, they can cause stalemates, become outdated and be applied in ways never intended.

At one time, I worked at a company that had Speed as a company value. This seemed sensible at first look and I was initially on board. As the company grew and I witnessed how this value was used, however, I quickly changed my mind and realised how damaging this type of term can be when used as a company value.

Let’s consider the intention when someone sets Speed as a value. They’re saying they want value to get to clients/customers as soon as possible. The response when someone says that: No shit! Really?

Every company providing any goods or services wants things to be done sooner. They want ideas to be tested to get feedback, they want production pipelines to be shorter, they want typists to type faster, they want faster throughput in anything they do. In this context, saying that speed is a value provides literally zero value. You may as well have a value that says “We do good work”.

In my experience of management in software companies, zero value is actually better than average, so I would be okay with that. But it gets worse.

Any company, providing any product/service, struggles with the cost/quality/time triangle (sometimes cost/scope/time). Anything that any company or person provides for another has its own balance of these to produce whatever is their thing.

When a core value of a company is one of these balancing pillars, it skews any conversation about how to approach pretty much anything. Take staffing: ‘why wouldn’t we grow the team at this cost? Don’t you value speed?’. Take any software problem: ‘Why can’t we hack this together even if we’ll need to rewrite it next month?’. Any measure of quality: ‘Why can’t we ship this? Company value is speed. It says so on the wall over there’

As a company grows, especially a tech startup, operations shift from a small team who all sit in the same room to multiple departments that, especially now, might even be remote. Sure, there are so many companies that lament the feeling of speed they had in the early days, but the requirements of these teams are vastly different. As a team grows, sure people can do things quickly, but in order to actually be effective there is no getting around the overhead of communication, especially written communication.

The joke becomes, velocity is speed with a direction.

I’d like to mention a value that appears to go against what I’m saying. Ryanair values reducing costs. But more specifically they value reducing cost for their customers. This means that if a part costs more for the company, but maybe lasts longer or requires less maintenance then it reduces cost for the customers. This is a perfectly healthy company value.

Articulating the values you want in a team or company can be very difficult. They can be interpreted in so many ways. But, simply saying you want your team to be good won’t make them so.