The engineering lead was frustrated. "I don't understand it," he told me. "We have smart people. We have good people. But nothing gets done."
I spent a week observing. What I found wasn't a team problem. It was a system problem.
The team was spending four hours a day in meetings. They had no clear priorities—everything was "priority one." Their deployment process required manual sign-offs from three different people. They were interrupted constantly by support tickets.
No amount of "trying harder" would fix that. The system was designed to be slow. And nobody had noticed.
The Diagnosis
Before you can fix a slow team, you need to understand why they're slow.
Is it process? Are there too many approvals, too many meetings, too many steps between idea and deployment?
Is it context? Is the codebase so complex that every change takes longer to understand than to implement?
Is it priority? Is the team pulled in too many directions, working on too many things, never able to focus?
Is it tooling? Do they spend more time fighting infrastructure than building features?
Most slow teams have some combination of all four. The good news is that all of these are fixable without replacing anyone.
The Process Fix
I've never seen a startup where process couldn't be simplified.
A team that needs six approvals to deploy a change will deploy less often. A team that has daily hour-long meetings will have less time to work. A team that requires sign-off from multiple stakeholders will move slower than a team that has clear ownership.
The solution isn't to eliminate all process. It's to eliminate process that doesn't add value.
A good rule of thumb: every process should have a clear purpose. If you can't articulate why a process exists, it probably shouldn't.
The Priority Fix
When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.
I've watched teams spend their days in a state of constant reactivity. Something urgent pops up. They drop what they're doing to handle it. Something else urgent pops up. They switch again.
At the end of the day, they've handled a dozen urgent things and made zero progress on anything that matters.
The solution is radical focus. Pick the two or three things that actually matter. Ignore everything else until those things are done.
This is harder than it sounds. Urgent things feel important. They demand attention. But urgent and important are different categories, and the best teams learn to distinguish them.
The Context Fix
Some teams are slow because they can't find anything.
"Where's the API documentation?"
"Who wrote this code?"
"Has anyone solved this problem before?"
Every minute spent searching is a minute not spent building.
The solution is investment in discoverability. Documentation that gets read. Code organization that makes sense. Knowledge sharing that actually happens.
This isn't glamorous work. But it's the difference between a team that can find what they need and a team that can't.
The Tooling Fix
Some teams are slow because their tools are fighting them.
A deployment process that takes an hour. A testing suite that takes two hours to run. A local environment that takes a day to set up.
Each of these is a tax on productivity. And like any tax, it adds up.
The solution is investment in developer experience. Make it easy to deploy. Make it fast to test. Make it simple to get started.
This might not be "product work," but it enables product work. And it's almost always worth the investment.
The Pattern
Here's what I've noticed: slow teams aren't broken. They're burdened.
They have too much process. Too many priorities. Too much complexity. Too many tool problems.
The solution isn't to work harder. It's to remove the burdens. Make it easier to do the right thing. Make it harder to do the wrong thing.
Remove the meetings. Simplify the process. Focus the priorities. Fix the tooling.
And suddenly, the same team is fast.
The Leader's Role
Fixing a slow team starts with the leader.
Leaders create systems. If the system is slow, the leader created that system (or allowed it to exist).
Leaders set priorities. If priorities are unclear, the leader made them unclear.
Leaders invest in tooling. If tools are broken, the leader hasn't prioritized fixing them.
The leader who wants a faster team needs to look in the mirror first. The problem isn't the team. The problem is the system the team operates in.
The Bottom Line
Before you fire anyone, try fixing the system.
Most teams are faster than their systems allow them to be. Remove the friction. Clarify the priorities. Invest in the tools.
And watch what happens.
Need Help Unblocking Your Team?
At Startupbricks, we help startups identify and remove the friction that's slowing them down. If your team feels faster than it should, let's talk.