In every software company, there’s a moment when a team looks at a problem and says, we can fix this fast.
It’s a tempting phrase. Quick wins feel good. They create the illusion of momentum. They give stakeholders confidence that things are moving. They help teams prove they can deliver.
But most of the time, quick wins aren’t really wins. They’re shortcuts dressed up as progress.
In the short term, they make people feel productive. In the long term, they quietly erode trust, stability and focus. The debt they create isn’t just technical. It’s organizational. It builds slowly, disguised as speed, until one day everything slows down and no one knows why.
I’ve seen this pattern play out in every kind of team; from scrappy startups to scaled engineering organizations. The impulse comes from a good place. Someone wants to show impact fast. A customer needs something urgently. A new leader wants to prove value. So the team skips one layer of design, compromises on testing or defers integration with the main system until later.
Later never comes.
That’s the thing about quick wins. They multiply. Once a company gets used to chasing them, they become the default operating mode. The team stops asking whether the work aligns with strategy. They just ask how fast it can be done.
Leadership starts rewarding firefighting instead of focus. Engineers learn that fixing what’s visible matters more than building what’s right.
It feels great at first.
Number of things done goes up. Releases become more frequent. Dashboards show movement. But under the surface, something starts to rot. The codebase becomes harder to change. Teams spend more time debugging than developing. Every new project needs another workaround for the last one. Eventually, the company reaches a point where progress looks busy but feels heavy.
One of my favorite examples came from a company where we shipped “quick wins” for almost a year straight. Every sprint, something new went out. Sales loved it. The board loved it. Customers thought we were unstoppable. Then we hit a wall.
A simple change request from a key customer took six weeks to deliver. Every part of the system was entangled with temporary fixes and “short-term” logic that had never been rewritten. We hadn’t built a product. We had built a collection of patches held together by optimism and duct tape.
When you peel it back, the core problem is that most organizations confuse urgency with importance. A quick win feels urgent because it’s visible. A scalable solution feels important but abstract. It’s hard to show progress when the work is mostly invisible i.e. refactoring, architecture decisions, infrastructure improvements etc.
Those things take time, yet they’re the only foundation for lasting speed.
Quick wins don’t just accumulate in code. They seep into culture.
Teams learn that short-term wins get celebrated and long-term work gets questioned. Product managers start optimizing for the next demo instead of the next quarter. Leadership reviews become a showcase of small wins instead of a reflection on outcomes. People start to believe that shipping something is always better than waiting.
The result is a culture addicted to motion without meaning.
There’s a simple test for whether a quick win is worth doing. Ask yourself if it moves the system forward or just hides the problem.
Sometimes, a quick win genuinely helps. For example, adding a short-term manual process to validate an idea before automating it can be smart. It tests assumptions before investing heavily. But shipping an unscalable feature because “we’ll fix it later” isn’t a win. It’s a delay of pain.
Good leaders know that momentum is not the same as progress. They protect their teams from the illusion of speed. They push for clarity on what actually matters. They slow down when things start moving too fast. They help everyone remember that the goal isn’t to look productive; it’s to be effective.
Actual progress in software feels almost boring. It’s when teams quietly strengthen the foundations. It’s when engineers delete code instead of adding it. It’s when the organization says no to things that don’t align with strategy, even when those things could be done quickly.
It takes discipline to say no to quick wins. It takes even more discipline to build systems that make quick wins unnecessary.
If you find yourself chasing short-term deliverables over long-term direction, take a step back. Look at your roadmap. Look at how much of it is reactive. Look at what you’ve postponed in the name of speed. That’s your real backlog.
Quick wins feel satisfying, but sustainable success comes from the unglamorous work of making better decisions, not faster ones.
In the end, the best teams don’t chase quick wins. They build durable systems that keep winning, long after the rush has worn off.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions... uuuhm... quick wins!