Work Harder Is Not a Strategy
By Michail Katkoff, who has led studios through both massive wins and some painful, humbling stalls.
My buddy and a former podcast co-host, Joseph Kim, who has been public about his studio’s struggles, recently wrote about an elegant distinction between speed and velocity on his Game Makers Substack.
I was triggered. In a good way. It forced me to think about why every studio I’ve ever run or advised has hit the same wall eventually. The wall looked different each time, slipping milestones, low morale, vague roadmaps, but the explanation was always the same: “We just need to move faster.”
I’ve told myself that too. I’ve rallied teams with the usual moves: working weekends, pushing feature cuts, calling all-hands meetings, and tossing out startup clichés like confetti. But it took me a while, longer than I care to admit, to realize that speed was never the real issue.
Some of my teams executed like a Swiss watch: clear priorities, fast sprints, minimal drama. Others, with the same level of talent, funding, and even excitement, jammed up within months. What I’ve learned (through both success and some very expensive tuition) is this:
Teams don’t fail because they’re slow. They fail because they’re misaligned, burning energy in all directions, and mistaking motion for progress.
That misalignment usually stemmed from a missing link: strategy. Not vision, not ambition, but strategy. The simple, brutal clarity about what we’re building, why it matters, and how we’re actually going to win. Without it, every decision becomes a debate, every roadmap a battlefield, and every sprint a negotiation.
Once I understood what strategy truly is, things changed. Hope this post will save you from some of the bumps I went through.
The Illusion of Progress
When velocity breaks down, it rarely feels like failure at first. It feels like work.
Jira tasks get finished. Prototypes are being tested. Meetings are happening. People are shipping. But if the strategy isn’t clear, or worse, if it’s outdated or wrong, then none of this motion is meaningful. It’s just noise. Activity mistaken for progress.
What usually happens next is a kind of creeping paralysis. The team starts to lose confidence, and the roadmap starts to bend toward consensus rather than conviction. And instead of spending time and effort building great products, solving user pain points, or outmaneuvering competitors, the team is consumed by internal coordination, politics, decision-making loops, and process management.
This is also when the leads double down on working harder, and founders regress to the “founder mode” and begin micromanaging. But direction is broken, so all that effort just digs a deeper hole.
If the above flares up your PTSD, trust me, you’re not the only one.
Strategy Isn’t a Slide Deck
Velocity begins with direction. And direction is the product of a clear, owned, actively communicated strategy. Not vibes. Not a “North Star” or a vision deck buried on a Confluence page. I’m talking about a real, working strategy that answers: What game are we building? Why will it win? Why us, why now?
The second most dangerous assumption leaders make after not having a real strategy is that “everyone already knows” the strategy.
They don’t. And even if they did, alignment fades. People interpret things differently. Roadmaps drift. New hires dilute focus. Without constant reinforcement, direction decays.
A functioning strategy isn’t static. It’s active. It lives in planning meetings, review calls, playtest debriefs, and hiring decisions. Teams that maintain velocity treat strategy as an operating system, not a mission statement.
I’ve mistaken activity for progress many times before. It’s when Jira tasks get finished. Prototypes are being tested. Meetings are happening. People are shipping. But none of this motion translates to meaningful progress because the strategy is unclear or outdated.
Why Execution Slows Down
Even with a clear direction, velocity dies in the details. The machine of execution, the product iteration cycle, has to be ruthlessly maintained. When iteration cycles stretch from days to weeks, or decisions require six stakeholders and three review meetings, or the same build gets playtested six times without meaningful change, you’re not iterating. You’re stalling.
This is where culture shows up. In good and in the bad.
Teams often inherit “collaboration” norms that discourage hard decisions. Founders may protect each other and early employees even if they’ve become bottlenecks. Leaders fail to make uncomfortable calls on people or processes because it’s easier to just keep going and empower the team to make the calls. They willfully forget that when the team fails, it’s the leader’s fault, not the team’s.
But velocity doesn’t survive in that environment. The best operators know that the game isn’t just about doing things, it’s about getting things done that matter. And that means optimizing the system. Mapping the cycle. Measuring the latency. Removing the bottlenecks. And yes, sometimes removing the people who are the bottlenecks.
Velocity Is Earned
The worst part about losing velocity is that it doesn’t feel like losing at first. You’re working. The roadmap’s moving. But something’s off. Twelve months pass, and you realize the market moved on, or worse, your own team did.
I’ve seen this from every seat: founder, studio lead, investor, and consultant. And I’ve lived the gut punch of realizing the studio isn’t stuck because people aren’t working hard, it’s stuck because no one knows what game we’re really playing anymore.
Velocity isn’t about being fast. It’s about moving forward together. And that only happens when the strategy is alive, when the bottlenecks are visible, and when leaders do the hard thing of saying “this matters, that doesn’t.”
It’s not fun. It’s not easy. But it is the job.
And if you’re in that stuck place right now, feeling the motion, but no progress, I promise you’re not alone. I’ve been there. I’ve lost momentum, clarity, and sometimes even confidence. But I’ve also found my way back, and helped others do the same.
And it always starts with asking the right question, not “how do we go faster?” but “where are we going, and why haven’t we gotten there yet?”
