There’s a common perception that big hairy audacious goals, to use Jim Collins’ expression, are achieved by taking gigantic leaps into the unknown with a maniacal urgency to get stuff done. The truth is nowhere near as dramatic.

Big goals are often achieved through the culmination of dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller wins. When you’re building a product or business for the first-time it is easy to underestimate the work and it is important to pace yourself.

One way to set the pace is to take the ‘crawl-walk-run’ approach. This forces you to set an intentionally slow and deliberate pace at the start of the project because decisions made in this first phase are notoriously difficult and expensive to change later.

These decisions lay the foundations and must be made carefully. These could cover all aspects of the product like pricing, design, marketing, hardware and software architecture, materials, testing, development, production and deployment.

Once the foundations are laid and everyone can see the building blocks the pace of the project can move to walking. A slightly faster pace but still intentional. Building the product needs to be done right – i.e. measure twice, cut once. Every step counts.

The pace of these early stages can feel excruciatingly slow. However, as the team and business gains confidence, momentum builds and the work gathers pace. The team shifts from the ‘what’ to figuring out ‘how’ and now they start to run.

There is always a moment in any project when the pieces of the puzzle start clicking into place. When this happens, the team move up a gear and find their stride. This happens because of the slower, deliberate and intentional phases of work that came before it.

You often hear the pervasive ‘fail fast’ mantra in start-ups, a belief that you must make it happen as fast as humanely possible. This is bad advice in my opinion because it always takes longer than you think, and you need to conserve energy to go the distance.

I can’t think of any business that doesn’t want to get a product into the marketplace as fast as it can. But before it does, it needs to be sure they are building the right product for the right customers at the right price. To do this requires deliberate pacing: crawl-walk-run.