The problem isn’t shipping fast. It’s not being able to fix fast.
Shipping slow doesn’t make you responsible. Shipping without the ability to fix fast does.
Research shows that technical debt increases deployment time from 20 minutes to 2 hours. That delay adds up. When something breaks, you can’t respond. When requirements change, you can’t adapt.
The real investment isn’t slowing down. It’s lowering the cost of each release.
Automated testing catches bugs before users do. CI/CD pipelines make deployments boring instead of scary. Feature flags let you ship and roll back in minutes. Monitoring tells you what broke before anyone reports it.
Teams that invest in release automation ship more often, not less. They move fast because fixing mistakes is cheap.
The teams stuck in maintenance mode? They shipped fast once - without building the safety net. Now every change is risky. Every release is manual. Every bug takes days instead of hours.
Moving fast is fine. Moving fast without a safety net isn’t.
How long does it take your team to deploy a one-line fix to production?