The Hidden Cost of Moving Without Purpose
Product teams are drowning in output. Sprints fly by. Features ship weekly. Updates roll out constantly. But all that motion doesn’t guarantee progress. Many organizations mistake velocity for vision, churning through work without understanding whether they’re heading toward anything meaningful.
Eric Morrison has spent 14 years leading user experience research at Google, TikTok, and Disney, where he’s seen this pattern repeat across teams of all sizes. With a background in history from Yale and a master’s degree in the Social Science of the Internet from Oxford, he brings an interdisciplinary lens to understanding why product teams stumble. Currently leading research at Google on AI in the workplace, Morrison studies how technology shapes collaboration, creativity, and productivity. His work focuses on helping teams move with intention rather than just speed.
“There is a hidden cost to moving fast without direction,” Morrison explains. “But there is also a massive cost to moving too slowly. If you take six months to deliver an insight, the world has already moved on.”
The Difference Between Speed and Direction
Speed measures how quickly you ship. Direction defines whether what you ship matters. Most product teams optimize obsessively for the former while treating the latter as something they’ll figure out along the way. The result is polished features that nobody needs and roadmaps built on assumptions rather than understanding.
According to research from the Product Development and Management Association, approximately 40% of new products fail at launch. Many of these failures stem from building the wrong thing efficiently rather than taking time to validate what users actually need. Teams conflate activity with achievement, mistaking a full backlog for strategic clarity.
Morrison sees this confusion play out in how teams make decisions. “Too often, product decisions are based on assumptions or one-off successes,” he says. “Our job is to find the repeatable formula. If we understand the fundamental process of why a user finds value, we can engineer that success again and again.”
Why Teams Default to Speed
The pressure to ship constantly comes from multiple sources. Stakeholders want visible progress. Competitors release features that create urgency. Agile methodologies emphasize iteration. Leadership rewards teams that demonstrate momentum. The street rewards companies that move at a breakneck speed. All of these forces push product teams toward prioritizing output over outcomes.
This bias toward speed also feels safer. Shipping features are concrete and measurable. Understanding user needs requires patience, interpretation, and comfort with ambiguity. When teams face uncertainty about direction, they often default to what they can control: how fast they move.
The problem intensifies in organizations that treat research as a checkbox rather than a foundation. Teams conduct a few user interviews, call it validation, and rush back to building. They want answers immediately, even when the questions haven’t been properly formed.
“I’ve always been fascinated by the underlying mechanics of how people adopt new tools,” Morrison notes. “My goal isn’t just to observe behavior, but to decode the specific sequences that lead to a successful product launch.”
What Direction Actually Requires
Direction starts with understanding the fundamental processes that drive user behavior. Not surface-level preferences or feature requests, but the deeper patterns that explain why people find value in the first place. This requires research that goes beyond asking users what they want.
Morrison’s approach draws from his background in history and social sciences. “History and the social sciences give me a unique approach to UX research,” he says. “I believe that even the most complex outcomes—say, for example: building a novel innovation, or driving viral adoption of a product—can be broken down into foundational processes that can be replicated.”
Establishing direction means identifying these foundational processes before committing to solutions. It requires teams to invest time in understanding context, motivations, and existing workflows. This work feels slow compared to jumping straight into design and development, but it prevents the much costlier mistake of building something nobody uses.
The key is calibrating your velocity to match reality. Move too slowly and opportunities pass. Move too fast and you optimize for efficiency while losing sight of effectiveness. The sweet spot is what Morrison calls strategic calibration, where teams align their pace with genuine understanding of user needs.
How to Fix the Speed Trap
Start by redefining what progress means. Instead of measuring success by features shipped per quarter, track whether those features create the outcomes you intended. Did users sustainably adopt the tool? Did it solve their actual problem? Did it change their behavior in meaningful ways?
Build research into every stage of product development, not as a gate to pass through but as continuous learning. Small, frequent studies beat massive research projects that delay decisions for months. The goal is to maintain direction while preserving momentum.
Create space for teams to question assumptions before locking into solutions. Morrison emphasizes the importance of understanding why things work. “History taught me to ask why things happen the way they do,” he reflects. “That curiosity still drives my work today.”
Establish clear criteria for what constitutes validated direction. This might include evidence that users recognize the problem you’re solving, data showing they currently use workarounds, or proof that your solution fits into their existing workflows. Define what you need to know before you can confidently move fast.
Finding Your Calibration Point
The right balance between speed and direction varies by context. Early-stage products need more investment in understanding user needs. Mature products with established user bases can move faster because foundational patterns are already clear. New markets demand more exploration. Familiar territories allow for quicker execution.
Morrison’s work on AI in the workplace demonstrates this calibration in action. His research explores how artificial intelligence can support creativity and teamwork rather than simply automating tasks. This requires a deep understanding of how people actually collaborate before rushing to build features.
“AI should amplify what people can do,” Morrison explains. “It’s about making work more human, not less.”
The teams that succeed long-term are those that build direction-finding into their culture. They treat understanding users as seriously as writing code. They recognize that the fastest path to impact often requires slowing down first to see clearly. Speed matters, but only when you’re heading somewhere worth going.
