Motion Without Movement

One of the easiest traps for teams to fall into is mistaking activity for progress.

Work is happening. Code is shipping. Tickets are closing. Metrics are moving.

From the outside, everything looks healthy.

But when you step back and ask what actually changed — for the customer, for the business, for the direction of the product — the answer is often unclear.

There’s motion. There just ain't much movement.

How teams get here

Most teams don’t end up in this state because they’re lazy or unfocused. They end up here because output is easy to see and outcomes aren’t.

You can measure velocity. You can count pull requests. You can track releases.

Impact takes longer. It’s noisier. It often shows up somewhere other than where the work happened.

So organizations drift toward what they can measure.

Shipping becomes the goal. Being busy becomes proof of effectiveness. Effort starts to substitute for results.

At some point, the question quietly shifts from “Did this help?” to “Did we deliver?”

When activity turns into thrash

This pattern shows up most clearly when teams are under pressure.

When priorities are unclear or goals conflict, activity tends to increase. Work gets broken into smaller pieces. More things get started. More things get shipped.

The system feels alive.

But much of that energy is just churn.

Work gets revisited. Features land and don’t meaningfully change behavior. Improvements ship, but nothing downstream looks different.

Everyone is working hard. Everyone feels busy. Few people are confident the work is making a real difference.

From a distance, it looks like momentum. Up close, it feels exhausting.

The leadership blind spot

Motion is reassuring. It feels like execution. It feels like control.

When things are moving, the pressure to ask harder questions drops. Those questions tend to introduce friction, uncertainty, and tradeoffs — so they’re easy to defer when the system already appears to be working.

Questions like:

What problem did this actually solve?
What changed as a result of this work?
What decision did this unlock?
What would we stop doing if this didn’t work?

Without those questions, teams can move quickly for long periods of time without materially changing anything that matters.

What I look for instead

When I’m trying to understand whether a team is making progress or just generating output, I don’t start with activity levels.

I look for signals like:

Can the team clearly articulate what changed after the last release?
Did the work reduce uncertainty, or just add more surface area?
Are priorities revisited based on what was learned?
Is anyone willing to slow down or stop when impact isn’t showing up?

Healthy teams aren’t the ones that ship the most. They’re the ones that notice when shipping isn’t helping.

Sometimes the most important decision isn’t what to build next. It’s whether continuing on the same path still makes sense.

The real distinction

Motion is easy to generate. Speed is easy to measure.

Progress is harder.

It requires judgment. It requires pauses. It requires a willingness to question whether effort is actually producing results — and to change course when it isn’t.

Teams don’t stall because they stop moving. They stall because they keep moving without checking whether the movement matters.

About the author

Andy Stark is a veteran of the United States Navy with 26 years in the software industry. He has founded companies, sold them, and participated in multiple acquisitions, exits, and technical due diligence efforts.

Today, Andy advises teams, founders, and investors through his consultancy, 32Results, focusing on product strategy, engineering execution, and decision-making during periods of change. He is also an aspiring circumnavigator, splitting his time between consulting and long offshore passages.