Slow Cooking.
Why great design needs time. Not just speed.
It’s been a while I didn’t write on a good old hot take. Allow me to back this one with both personal experiences AND actual science.
As usual please reach out and let me know what you thought about it.
“In startups, you’re either fast or forgotten.”
“It’s now or never.”
“We need to ship this on [insert unrealistic deadline] or we’re dead.”
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to read this in my career. And I’m already tired knowing that I’ll have to hear this for years to come.
I’m not mad about the fact that, yes, you need to be fast to compete. Especially in Builder Mode, where velocity is an unfair advantage.
I’m just upset there is absolutely no nuance in the industry.
It’s been drilled into our heads since the Facebook early days “Move fast and break things”.
Well, it didn’t age that well.
The work that truly resonates, the icons, the products that change industries, they weren’t microwaved.
They were slow-cooked.
We all love a good dose of rush adrenaline. When you’re in the zone.
Together with my previous design teams, we coined the term BDM “Bouses de Dernière Minute” (last minute craps).Those chaotic, last-minute designs you’re ashamed to put in front of stakeholders for reviews.
We’ve had our fair share of those, yet some of them ended up magical, sometimes shipped overnight to millions.
But most of time, let’s be honest.
Creativity and excellence need time.
The best meals aren’t instant. They marinate, simmer, evolve.
Flavors deepen overnight.
Great design is no different.
Lately, I’ve started taking time again.
Time to design exactly what I want. Time to play tennis at 10 am. A random Thursday off to catch a movie.
Then coming refreshed. Recharged.
It’s not luxury. It’s process.
Something essential I’d forgotten after years in the trenches.
Previous Metalab’s General Manager, Mark Nichols thinks we all deserve a bit more leisure. And I couldn’t agree more.
But taking it slow isn’t procrastination. Quite the opposite.
True creativity rarely happens at your desk.
It happens when your mind relaxes, during mundane activities: cooking dinner, walking your dog, commuting without expectations.
That’s when magic strikes, quietly, almost passively.
Psychologists call it incubation: your brain forming connections subconsciously while you’re doing unrelated tasks.
One study found around 20% of creative breakthroughs among writers and physicists emerged precisely during these everyday moments, freeing the mind from fixations.
In other words, stepping away isn’t wasted time. It’s productive time.
Yet, the tech industry often mistakes these invisible moments of incubation for instant epiphanies, feeding the myth of overnight success.
We romanticize instant hits because they sound epic. But we overlook that resilience, instinct, and taste (the real ingredients basically) take years to cultivate.
Zenly’s 40 million monthly active users didn’t appear overnight. It took years.
Eight, to be precise.
Sure, some rushed projects land beautifully, but even those rely on taste slowly and painfully acquired. You can’t sprint your way to good taste. You have to marinate in it.
I get the appeal of rush mode. I’ve felt it countless times.
When a concept clicks and you’re riding that wave of unstoppable flow, it’s exhilarating.
Pure dopamine.
But truthfully, I’ve always felt torn between moving fast and taking my time.
Even today, I feel ashamed when I speed things up and guilty whenever I slow down.
Navigating between these modes is exhausting.
Unfortunately, our industry still doesn’t get it.
We’re still trapped in endless “creative jams” and the dreaded “let’s run a crazy 8 after lunch”.
Still asked to produce “three bold directions by EOD”.
Still forced to treat creativity like a shiny call-to-action button you can press on demand.
Still forced to commit to unrealistic sprint deadlines.
Candidly, this is also why we need more designers and creatives as founders.
Speed isn’t volume. Volume isn’t quality.
Never has been.
And no, you can’t schedule epiphanies. You can only leave space for them to occur. You can create opportunities for them, and basically provoke them.
I should write soon about how your environment and the people you work with are absolutely critical in how productive you are.
But anyway, I’ve seen teams crushed by technical and design debt because they refused to slow down strategically.
I won’t (can’t) name-drop, but trust me: more companies than you imagine are struggling under mountains of bad tempo calls and rushed decisions.
Rushing piles up debt. And debt eventually kills creativity, preventing those sweet flow modes to happen.
And don’t get me started on the mental toll inflicted by debt on engineering and design teams. This alone deserves a few issues to focus on.
Granted this hardly applies to early-stage companies but Sir Jony Ive’s comment hits hard (yeah, him again, what can I say).
People confuse innovation with being different or breaking stuff […]
Breaking stuff and moving on quickly […] leaves us surrounded with carnage.
Sir Jony Ive - Fireside Chat at Stripe Sessions 2025
While you can sometimes take a few shortcuts, design is not manufacturing.
It’s not linear, predictable, or instantaneous.
The best work you’ve ever done might have felt fast, but only because something deeper had time to marinate beneath the surface, long before shipping.
The final pixels and bits can ship quickly. But the instincts, the skills, and the taste behind them were cultivated slowly, carefully.
Experienced founders eventually realize the speed-vs-quality trade-off is dynamic.
In the earliest stages, speed matters. You ship fast, learn faster, and survive.
But post-PMF, or whatever you call that next stage, slowing down isn’t getting stuck.
It’s getting ready.
Great design simply can’t be rushed. It can happen in quiet, unexpected moments, those cracks and pauses where ideas breathe.
Deliberate offscreen time, even if it feels like “doing nothing,” compounds far more than speed ever will.
Shift gears. Slow down.
Let yourself cook a bit longer.
Bon appétit.
Julien.