The Theatre of Delivery: Why Speed Without Discipline Is a Lie

We once understood how to build well. We understood that "Done" meant usable. That "Ready" meant shared understanding. That quality could not be separated from delivery. That value resided not in the number of features, but in the satisfaction of those using them.

Over time, we abandoned these principles. Not due to their failure, but because they demanded discipline. We called this abandonment speed.

Product Theatre: The Illusion of Delivery

Today, teams release features without concern for readiness or consequences. Engineers adopt shortcuts, optimising for output rather than experience. Product teams prioritise volume over outcomes. Acceptance criteria receive little attention. Definitions of Ready and Done gather dust. Feedback loops weaken or disappear.

This resembles speed, but it remains theatre.

Features satisfy OKRs and serve as ammunition for funding narratives. Resilience, observability, and operability receive attention only after the fact, handed off to engineering once product moves on. Backlogs quietly absorb remediation tasks and incident responses, normalised as routine rather than recognised as failures. Accumulating debt through shortcuts no longer signals failure, only velocity.

Platform teams face this even more acutely: isolated from feedback, pressured to deliver, and evaluated by integration metrics unrelated to actual impact.

Organisations confuse motion with value. Releases occur in volume, but few question whether anyone benefits.

The Misreading of Startup Culture

This drift originates in a misreading of startup culture. Startups ought to remain lean. Resource-limited. Forced to optimise. Their teams must remain focused and deliberate due to limited capacity. They must construct resilient systems not despite their size, but because of it. So that small teams operate with calm, sustainability, and clarity. Everyone benefits when lean principles receive proper respect.

Frugality does not justify cutting corners. It exists to elevate standards.

To achieve more through constraint, not chaos.

Yet startup mythology often serves to justify disorder. Structure becomes bureaucracy. Alignment, waste. Quality, someone else's problem. Agility, once the hallmark of effective startups, now carries blame. Rather than disciplined responsiveness, organisations chase speed at all costs. Innovation becomes indistinguishable from disorder.

Empathy Lost on Both Sides

This dysfunction affects product and engineering alike. Neither holds moral superiority. Beliefs across both have shifted. Individuals turn inward, separated from customers and from each other. Metrics replace meaning. Careers replace missions. Customer pull disappears.

As outlined in a previous article, disconnection causes this collapse. Empathy fades. In its absence, individuals pursue self-interest. They target metrics, not outcomes. Numbers replace belief. Belief yields to self-promotion. Goodhart’s Law thrives: KPIs become career accelerators, volume becomes obligation, and customer value vanishes.

Hero culture intensifies this erosion. Lone coders discard rules to ship faster. They bypass traceability, test coverage, infrastructure-as-code, and standards, citing urgency. These behaviours do not reflect courage. They reflect system failure.

When empathy disappears, so does ownership.

The Forgotten Guardrails

Minimum Delivery Standards (Non-Negotiable)

• DoR and DoD remain visible, defined, and enforced across all teams
• Test coverage maintains a baseline and undergoes quarterly review
• No service deploys without multi-region failover in place
• Every Epic and User Story begins with defined, measurable SLOs
• Customer satisfaction integrates from inception, not post-delivery

These practices do not block progress. They form its foundation.

The Definition of Ready and the Definition of Done exist to promote accountability. They ensure shared understanding. They preserve the integrity of delivery by embedding clarity and care. Ignoring them invalidates delivery.

Customer satisfaction must not be appended after the roadmap. It must anchor the process from the beginning. It does not constitute a feature. It defines the work.

Discipline begins with deliberate action. Maintain test coverage. Re-evaluate quarterly. Never deploy without failover across regions. Begin with SLOs, not architecture diagrams. These actions signal care, not overhead.

Adherence to process requires no belief.

One need not believe in alignment to apply it. But consistent, deliberate use of guardrails repairs the broken window. It begins the restoration of shared intent.

History offers sobering reminders. The Space Shuttle Challenger failed not due to ignorance, but because critical knowledge remained unheard. The Therac-25 caused deaths through unchecked assumptions and missing feedback loops. In both cases, what lacked was not intelligence, but process, communication, and shared responsibility.

We face the same risk. Returning to DoR and DoD does not represent idealism. It reflects the minimum threshold for restoring delivery integrity.

A Return to Craft

This reflection does not stem from nostalgia. It reflects necessity.

Organisations require fewer rituals and more responsibility. Teams must extend care beyond their immediate scope. We must stop applauding feature counts and begin interrogating outcomes.

Delivery regains its meaning only through shared discipline.

As Warren Buffett stated, "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it."

We must treat quality, trust, and user value as essential, not optional.

The good news: discipline scales. Craft spreads. Respect for delivery may yet return. One story, one agreement, one genuine "done" at a time.