I agree with this article, however I think it misses the most valuable aspect of speed: compounded returns on experience.
Experience isn't 1:1 with time spent. It's easy to spend a lot of time on something but learn very little. Conversely, its possible to gain a large amount of experience in a short period of time.
By being able to develop faster, you become able to accumulate more experience in a smaller amount of time. This experience then enables you to develop faster, kicking off a virtuous cycle of growth.
Following this thought provides clarity on what action you should take immediately: do anything as long as its something. Through doing something, you will become more experienced and that experience will enable you to do something else even faster.
This is why you end up with so many aphorism in the industry promoting rapid action over inaction:
- Move fast and break things
- Worse is better
- Fail fast
- Hacker mentality
- "Action oriented"
See also: https://danluu.com/productivity-velocity/ and https://patrickcollison.com/fast
Yes; failures generate data. But you need devs who can understand why something fails....