If you’ve ever been a part of a startup team at the early stages, you know velocity (or what we called momentum) isn’t just a buzzword; it’s everything. It’s what keeps the customers hooked to the product, keeps the investors on board, and gets the product inching toward what the users really need. But here’s the thing: moving fast isn’t necessarily about running as fast as possible. It’s about sprinting smart. Because if you run too fast for too long, you’re going to break something. Sometimes, just sometimes, it might be the people on your team.
Having been a Founding Software Engineer at a lean tech team, I’ve been right in the middle of this balancing act. It’s fast-paced and dynamic. And when you get it right, a small, focused crew can deliver results that rival much larger teams. Here’s what worked for us and what I wish startups discussed more openly.
Moving Fast Doesn’t Mean Breaking Everything
We’ve all heard the phrase “move fast and break things.” But, in all fairness, it’s one of those phrases that sounds cooler than it is. Moving fast doesn’t mean throwing caution to the wind. It’s simply about knowing what you can afford to break and what has to hold steady no matter what.
When you’re building something new, technical debt is not the enemy if you’re intentional about it. It’s like throwing over a bit of extra weight to get there faster now, with a plan to drop it when you need to. If you don’t keep an eye on it, though, that weight piles up and you’re hauling a mountain later. Not fun.
How We Kept the Engine Running: Systems, Tools, and Processes
From my experience, the secret to keeping a small team moving fast is to have a great balance of three things: good systems, right tools, and processes that make things flexible yet focused.
Systems: Show, Don’t Just Tell
We did weekly feature showcases. That was an hour where we presented what we made in front of everybody in the company. Not just the tech team, but marketing, product managers, the whole thing. This did two things: First, it kept everyone in sync. Marketing could plan campaigns better, product folks adjusted priorities faster, and no one was surprised by what was coming. Second, it gave us engineers a chance to get some love for what we’d done. Trust me, those little moments of recognition matter more than you’d think. In addition, whenever a feature went live, we’d post quick Loom videos to explain what changed. It saved us from endless meetings and helped keep communication flowing without the usual bottlenecks.
Tools: Working Smarter, Not Harder
Having fewer members in your team means you cannot afford to have specialized teams. So, you need tools that can handle most of the work. For us, SST (Serverless Stack) was the breakthrough. It handled our AWS resource management and scaling seamlessly. It let us avoid those days or weeks of babysitting infrastructure and focus on shipping features. It spared us those awful late-night outages as well.
Processes: Short Cycles and Smart Bets
We had short development cycles, typically one or two weeks. Breaking down the work into smaller chunks allowed us to be agile and change direction if we had to. Startups are famously unstable, so that flexibility was a goldmine. We also used a lot of feature flags and rolling rollouts. Rather than waiting for a perfect “big bang” launch, we could release early, gather feedback, and iterate incrementally. That being said, there are instances where you ship with known rough edges. It’s not ideal, but as long as you document what’s pending and don’t let things slide indefinitely, you stay ahead of bigger problems.
The Slow Burn of Burnout
High speed is exciting until it starts to wear you down. I’ve seen the signs of danger: the team stops brainstorming, quality suffers, and people just go through the motions. It’s subtle at first, but dangerous.
Something that we really found effective was a routine cleanup sprint. It was basically a special week to have time to pay down technical debt in our underlying infrastructure. It wasn’t just about code. It was also about clearing the mental clutter. The team felt refreshed, more confident, and yes, faster after that week. It’s sort of like tidying up your desk before starting a big project.
Perfect or Done? Managing the Tension
Here’s a tough reality: founders want to go fast, engineers want to be polished, and sometimes it feels like a tug-of-war. What worked for us was creating a shared framework for making decisions.
We asked:
- Is this on the critical path for our users? If so, fix it now.
- Is this an edge case that only a few care about? Ship now, document it, fix it later.
It sounds simple, but having that terminology to use to talk about trade-offs kept us from endless argumentation and allowed us to stay on track to deliver core value.
Culture Matters More Than You Think
All the processes and systems won’t work if the culture doesn’t support them. What helped us was the trust that the founders and engineers had amongst us. We took the time to celebrate small victories, no matter how small. It kept morale high and helped us remember that progress, however incremental as it may be, is progress. And, crucially, we paid technical debt as part of our regular cadence, not some dreaded drudge. It was our safety valve, how we kept the codebase and the team healthy.
The Takeaway
Velocity isn’t just speed. It’s speed without breaking your people. If you want your startup to keep shipping, keep innovating, and keep growing, you must build feedback loops into your systems, select tools that allow you to scale without extra hands, run processes that allow for quick pivots, and, most importantly, build a culture where the team feels heard, valued, and supported. Because when all is said and done, it’s not “move fast and break things”, it’s move fast and keep your people whole.
