Blog | Generative AI
Move Fast, Break Things… and Then Spend Years Fixing Them
6 August 2025
Tony Butler
Managing Director, Decision Inc. Australia
Speed is gospel in the start-up world. Growth is explosive, products ship in sprints, and systems are stitched together just well enough to hold the rocketship together. But eventually, the same speed that fuelled momentum starts eating the business from the inside out. What’s left is a brittle core wrapped in layers of invisible tech debt, cracks that only show when something breaks.
The phrase “move fast and break things” was coined to glorify bold iteration. But for many companies, it’s become a recipe for compounding chaos. At Facebook, it worked, until it didn’t. Even Zuckerberg quietly revised the mantra years ago, swapping it for something with a little more restraint: move fast with stable infrastructure. That edit never went viral, but maybe it should have.
The Hidden Cost of Speed
Tech debt doesn’t show up in your financial reports, but it bleeds into every part of your business. It lives in duct-taped integrations, manual workarounds, inconsistent customer data, and code no one wants to touch. In the early stages, it’s invisible: everything looks fine because you’re shipping fast, acquiring users, and raising rounds. But velocity at all costs is like building a skyscraper on sand. Sooner or later, the cracks appear.
A missed integration triggers billing errors. A broken deployment undermines impacts your frontline staff. Customers start asking why things don’t work the way they should. Morale dips. Brand is impacted. The recruitment process slows because your codebase is impossible to onboard into. And just when you hit your next round of investor due diligence, the whole stack groans under the weight of scale.
The irony? Much of this debt was avoidable, or at least manageable. But in hypergrowth environments, infrastructure decisions are often deferred in favour of short-term wins. What gets deprioritised is rarely seen as urgent… until it’s blocking progress.
Tech debt isn’t always easy to diagnose, but there are red flags. If your product roadmap keeps slipping because “it’s harder than expected”, you’re likely paying interest on past shortcuts and a lack of foundational investment. If customer journeys rely on your operations team to manually bridge tools, you’ve outgrown your systems. If your engineers spend more time fixing bugs than building features, you’re not innovating, you’re bailing water.
The most dangerous tech debt isn’t old code, it’s disjointed systems and teams working in silos. When platforms don’t integrate, data doesn’t flow. When processes rely on tribal knowledge, scale stalls. When teams can’t trust their tools, productivity dies.
It also damages your ability to hire and retain. Talented engineers don’t want to spend their days debugging duct tape. Operations teams don’t want to be the glue holding processes together. And sales teams won’t hit quota if customers churn from unreliable experiences.
The longer you defer transformation, the harder and more expensive it becomes. One day of “we’ll fix it later” turns into years of engineering bandwidth lost to maintenance. Left unaddressed, tech debt becomes an anchor that slows every team in the business.
Run vs Transform
Every company hits a point where it needs to stop running and start refactoring. But transformation isn’t just about throwing money at new tools, it’s about making deliberate, strategic calls.
Start by understanding your actual cost of “run”. What percentage of your resources are spent just keeping systems alive? If it’s above 70 per cent, your ability to innovate is capped. The goal isn’t to eliminate all debt, but to rebalance the equation. Choose transformation projects that unlock cross-functional value. Make room for platform simplification. And don’t fall into the trap of over-investing in systems no one wants to use
Transformation also requires alignment, across leadership, delivery teams, and change agents. You need a clear strategy, executive buy-in, and a way to measure improvement. This isn’t just IT’s problem to solve; it’s a business imperative.
Moving fast is still essential, but not at the expense of breaking what actually matters. Client experience. Culture. Trust.
High-growth companies don’t fail because they move too slowly. They fail because they mistake speed for progress, and ship chaos disguised as momentum. If tech debt is already choking your teams, now’s the time to face it. Build deliberately. Transform intentionally. And move fast, with stability.