Maker's Notes: You Don’t Find Clarity by Thinking—You Find It by Moving
Are you building fast enough to learn? If not, it might be time to rethink how your team moves.
Hey makers & breakers,
I hope you’re easing into the week with a bit of breathing space—whether it’s coffee, a quiet inbox, or just a moment to think before the pace picks up.
The previous week, I’ve been reflecting on the tempo of product work in 2025. We talk a lot about pace—how fast we ship, how quickly we learn, how urgently we move. But lately, I’ve found myself asking: what are we actually trying to keep up with?
Because the real shift isn’t just technological—it’s structural. We’re no longer measured by resources or headcount. We’re measured by how fast we can learn.
“In modern product markets, speed is oxygen.” — NFX
That line stopped me. It reframes speed not as a tactic, but as a condition of survival. And that makes mindset, not tooling, the most important variable.
Here are the ideas that landed, and what they might mean for how we build next.
At Makers & Breakers, I explore the art of creation and reinvention, building systems that matter, breaking down barriers, and reflecting on the lessons we uncover along the way.
Maker’s Notes is where I share personal insights and stories from the frontlines of product development, leadership, and tech. These reflections tackle the messy realities of building, breaking, and learning—designed to challenge assumptions and spark new ways of thinking.
Speed as a Learning System
The first shift is a mental one: we need to move from planning perfectly to learning quickly.
“Perfection is a false god when the environment is changing daily.”
It’s easy to forget how quickly a static plan becomes irrelevant. Roadmaps, spec documents, approval flows—they offer comfort, but not clarity. In reality, clarity comes from contact—from releasing something, getting feedback, and adjusting in motion.
We’ve seen this again and again: scrappy flows that deliver more insight than six-week strategy decks. Cupcake versions that teach us more than full-course builds. Teams that learn faster are the ones that win, not the ones that architect better hypotheticals.
Every Feature is a Bet
What stood out in the NFX piece is the idea that fast companies treat product as a series of ongoing experiments, not as a blueprint.
“Each release is a directional probe, not a final answer.”
That’s not just a clever metaphor—it’s a posture. It asks us to accept that we’re working with probabilities, not guarantees. We can’t know what works until we try. So instead of chasing certainty, we build momentum.
Today’s tools now let us test ideas faster than ever before. The barrier to iteration is lower, but the mindset still matters most. Are we willing to treat shipping as learning, not validation?
Clarity Emerges from Action
One of the hardest things to explain to stakeholders—especially in early-stage work—is that we’re not waiting for the full picture. We’re building our way into it.
“You won’t know the true shape of the opportunity until you’ve built your way into it.”
This resonates deeply. I’ve seen teams delay launches in search of total clarity, only to realise the clarity never arrives. But give them a stub, a rough prototype, a small cohort—and suddenly they have real questions, real feedback, and real traction.
We don’t get clarity before the build. We earn it through the build.
Speed Without the Drama
Of course, speed carries baggage. We’ve all seen it misused—rushed launches, unclear roles, frayed teams. So here’s where the nuance matters:
“Speed doesn’t mean reckless—it means unblocked.”
This is what the best teams get right. They create systems that enable momentum without sacrificing responsibility. Structured rituals. Tight feedback loops. Lightweight governance that protects the team and the velocity.
Tools can help by generating tests, smoothing handovers, or keeping quality high. But they aren’t magic. They’re enablers. The mindset is still what matters.
The Mindset Isn’t Just for Founders
This is the piece that doesn’t get said enough: speed isn’t a founder’s mindset. It’s a team culture.
It’s tempting to see momentum as a top-down effect. A visionary pushes the pace, and everyone else catches up. But in practice, the pace is sustained by product managers making trade-offs, designers deciding what’s “enough,” engineers clearing their own blockers, QA leads enabling launch, not pausing it.
The team has to believe that progress comes from motion, not certainty. That moving early is not a risk to be managed, but a discipline to be refined.
Without that shared conviction—conviction that the build is where the real answers live—speed won’t matter. You’ll stall anyway.
Why Now
The pace of product is accelerating—not just because of new tools, but because expectations around learning, adaptation, and value delivery are rising.
Small, focused teams can now outlearn much larger ones—not because they’re faster by default, but because they embrace a culture of learning through action.
Speed, done right, isn’t chaos. It’s care. It’s respect for the fact that no plan survives contact, and the sooner we learn, the sooner we improve.
If you’re still reading, here’s the ask:
Where are you overplanning what you could be testing?
Where is your team slow, not because of bugs, but because of permission?
Where are you holding back clarity by waiting instead of building?
We don’t need to move recklessly. But we do need to move.
Let’s keep pushing forward.
—Luka
Source: inspired by NFX: Speed and the AI Product Stack