Speed-only cultures build hidden debt, not velocity.
Teams cut the structure to meet urgency. Boundaries remain undefined. Interfaces stay implicit. Ownership drifts. Everything feels faster for a moment, then the drag sets in.
Hidden debt isn’t obvious. It’s small shortcuts that add up: a workaround left in place, an unrecorded schema change, a dependency added with the mindset that “we’ll fix it later.” None of these cause immediate harm, but over time, they all take their toll.
Delivery slows down long before anyone notices the cause-more meetings, more clarifications, more senior engineers reconstructing instead of building. This isn’t a people problem; it’s a structural one.
Velocity is only sustainable when architecture manages complexity rather than passing it to teams. Without that, every attempt to go faster creates more drag.
Surface one shortcut today that now costs you time every week.