It was June 2023 and I was a product manager at Sysdig. Like every Tuesday morning, I was running my DPE call, which stands for design, product, engineering. The format was always the same: what are we building? In what order? What needs to happen before it moves to the next stage? Where are we blocked?

One Tuesday, leadership joined. My manager and my engineering lead's manager announced a full company rebrand, a strategic product launch and September as the deadline. We had three months.

The next thing I heard: "We have to move fast."

Those last words, move fast, made my whole body contract. It was the same irked feeling I had as a kid when I was being rushed to get dressed or while finishing to tie my shoelaces, and I didn't understand why. I could grasp only the pressure and the implied assumption that I was not moving fast enough, that I was not doing enough.

I checked the energy of the room. It felt like standing at the start line of a race right before the gun goes off. There was pent-up energy as everyone was about to launch forward. In a race, you know the distance and you know the track. Here we were about to sprint with no clear sense of direction, no pacing, nothing except a date three months out.

So I asked: what did we commit to delivering? What do we need to build?

Blank stares.

I tried again. What specifically did we agree to with the marketing team? With leadership?

Silence. "We just have to deliver for the deadline."

In that silence, I saw the gap between decision and action, so I did what I always do when I identify a gap: I started building a solution to close it. Instead of naming what no one had thought through, I asked myself how my team and I were going to make this work.

In product, success means a feature that is valuable to the customer, functional, and documented. I started by aligning with my manager, his manager, and marketing on the story we wanted to tell. With the destination clear, I worked back from our September deadline with the design and engineering teams on what we could actually deliver in the time we had.

After a couple back and forths, I created a single project document highlighting scope, timelines, priority, and status for everyone to see. Every team knew where things stood and every change of priority had a place to be captured without derailing everything. When leadership saw it, they seemed relieved. We had one source of truth for the next three months and simply needed to execute on the plan.

We successfully met our deadline with engineering having shipped their features and marketing having all the assets they needed. The launch went out with nothing left open.

The gap between decision and action is not always as visible as blank stares in a conference room. At Sysdig, it would creep up in my calendar every week. Mornings were packed with back to back meetings and early afternoons too, until I had no block of more than an hour available to get into deep work. Without that time, some weeks I was left making decisions on the fly with an incomplete picture of where we were actually going. It was like putting the tracks down right as the train arrives, instead of having a long enough runway to let it build speed.

The decision that would actually change the trajectory, the one that requires uninterrupted thinking and a clear destination, is never given space to make it onto the schedule.

The image I keep coming back to is the treadmill. You can be running fast and still have gone nowhere. Pent-up energy, full effort, zero distance covered. You can run on that treadmill for as long as you want and the machine will reward the motion. It will never ask you where you're going.

The hardest part is that it does not feel wrong while it is happening. The motion is familiar. The speed is familiar. I have been here before and moved through it, so my body reads it as competence. Nothing signals to me that something is off. The treadmill does not vibrate differently when I have been on it too long. It just keeps moving at the same pace, rewarding the same effort, and the repetition confirms itself.

 In an industry where AI is compressing decision cycles and the cost of misalignment compounds fast, the most expensive thing a cybersecurity leader can be missing is a clear sense of where they are actually running. Even though everything looks like progress with calendars staying full, the finish line stays undefined.

Sometimes, in my own business, I catch myself saying the same thing: I need to move fast. I need to move faster. 

When I hear it, I notice the same physical reaction, the same contraction in my body. It shows up most on the days when I lift my head from the computer and it is later than I expected. Time has warped and flown while I was somewhere else entirely. My thoughts are frazzled like a computer that has been running hot for too long and with too many tabs open at once. My backside aches from the chair I have not gotten up from in far too long. 

When I look at what actually mattered that day, the high-priority items are sitting exactly where I left them that morning because I let myself get pulled toward the easier, more rewarding task. I responded to the email as it landed in my inbox, checked the latest LinkedIn or WhatsApp notification and reached out to people for the sake of reaching out.

When I finally register what has happened, it feels like being tapped on the shoulder by a trainer who is telling me to get off the treadmill because I zoned out on it for far too long. This abrupt halt is accompanied by a sudden awareness of how long the motion has been happening without actually going anywhere. 

On the nights before these days, I have not written down the three things I was committing to the next morning. I opened my laptop without a destination and by late afternoon the day had given me exactly what I set myself up for: visible activity instead of actual output.

In that July conference room, no one could answer the most basic question: what exactly were we building?

The energy and the motion were there. From every angle, everything looked like a team in full sprint. What was missing was a destination, and without a destination, when the gun goes off and everyone runs hard, the treadmill moves and the machine rewards the motion. Still, no one stopped to ask where it's going.

I still hear that voice and I probably always will. The difference now is what happens in the moment between hearing it and responding to it.

PS: The irony of "move fast" is that the team who delivered on time was the one that stopped first.

See you Saturday.

Victoria Grandury
CEO & Founder, Limitless Rebel
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