When Speed Stops Being the Point

Turns out the "soft" work was the hard part all along

I asked one of our engineers to estimate how much work it would take to make our product work in multiple languages. Just a rough sense of scope. Not asking him to build it, just tell me if it’s a big project or a small one.

The next time we talked, he’d already built it.

Turns out it was easier to implement than to estimate. Why spend time analyzing when you can just... do it and see?

I offered to help with the tedious part: moving all the hardcoded strings into translation files. Manual work, the kind that used to take hours of mind-numbing copy-paste. With AI, it took minutes. Review, commit, done.

The whole thing took a few hours, from “how big is this project?” to “it’s live.” Time to market used to be measured in weeks or months for something like this. Now it’s measured in hours.

I kept thinking: wait, what just happened to my job?

Hi! I’m Emma. I work across design, product, and operations. This is me thinking out loud about AI, work, and what we’re actually optimizing for.

The Shift Nobody Prepared Me For

Speed used to be the thing we worried about. Can we build this fast enough? Do we have the resources? How do we prioritize when everything takes forever?

Now? Speed isn’t really the problem anymore.

What matters now is something I didn’t expect: figuring out what’s actually worth building in the first place.

Those questions have always mattered. What’s worth building, for whom, why. They’ve just been systematically undervalued. We built our entire work culture around shipping code. That was “real work.” The technical work. The work that got rewarded, promoted, well-compensated.

The people asking “what problem does this solve?” and “for whom?” We called that soft skills. Important enough to have someone doing it, sure, but not important enough to pay them like engineers.

Then we sorted people into roles based on that value system. If you could ship fast, you were an engineer. The “real” technical work. If you asked questions, you went into design, research, strategy. The “soft” stuff. And unsurprisingly, those fields ended up with different gender distributions and different pay scales.

Now execution isn’t as scarce anymore. And those “soft skills” we undervalued? Turns out they’re the hard part.

What We’ve Been Dismissing as Overthinking

I come from UX, where asking uncomfortable questions was literally part of the job. “What problem does this solve? Have we talked to users?” The kind of questions that make people shift in their seats.

For years, we measured work by execution. Can you code? Can you ship? Can you move fast?

The people who slowed things down to ask “but why?” or “for whom?” got labeled as overthinking. I’ve definitely been that person. Still am, actually. The one asking uncomfortable questions, standing between the team and shipping fast. Turns out I just needed to wait for the job description to catch up.

Here’s what’s weird now: execution isn’t the constraint anymore. AI can help with a lot of that. What’s hard (what was always hard) is knowing which questions to ask in the first place. Understanding the problem deeply enough to know what’s worth building. And for whom. And why.

Turns out those reflective questions that slow you down? They’re not obstacles. They’re the whole job now.

But Hold On

This doesn’t mean technical skills suddenly became irrelevant. Someone still had to build the tools that let the rest of us execute faster. The engineering depth, the systems thinking, that’s still completely essential.

But the engineers who are thriving now? They’re not just executors. They’re people who understand the whole system and can think end-to-end, not just implement the task someone handed them.

My engineer didn’t just write code for multi-language support. He understood what we were trying to enable, asked the right people for input, saw how it fit into the bigger picture, and solved it completely.

The work itself changed. It’s not less technical. It’s technical plus understanding why.

What This Means

I don’t know if this shift will actually change how we value work. Maybe the “soft skills” will finally get paid like they matter. Maybe we’ll recognize that asking “what’s worth doing?” is just as technical as figuring out how to do it.

Or maybe we’ll just find new ways to undervalue the reflective work while celebrating speed.

But I do know this: the people who’ve been asking “but why?” and “for whom?” all along, the ones who slowed things down to understand the problem, they weren’t obstacles to good work. They were doing it.

The work changed. Whether how we value work changes too is still an open question.

But I’m pretty sure it’s the more interesting one.

---