​​Work Harder Is Not a Strategy

By Michail Katkoff , who has led studios through both massive wins and some painful, humbling stalls. My buddy and a former podcast co-host, Joseph Kim , who has been public about his studio’s struggles, recently wrote about an elegant distinction between speed and velocity on his Game Makers Substack . I was triggered.

In a good way. It forced me to think about why every studio I’ve ever run or advised has hit the same wall eventually. ” I’ve told myself that too.

I’ve rallied teams with the usual moves: working weekends, pushing feature cuts, calling all-hands meetings, and tossing out startup clichés like confetti. But it took me a while, longer than I care to admit, to realize that speed was never the real issue. Some of my teams executed like a Swiss watch: clear priorities, fast sprints, minimal drama.

Others, with the same level of talent, funding, and even excitement, jammed up within months. What I’ve learned (through both success and some very expensive tuition) is this: Teams don’t fail because they’re slow.   That misalignment usually stemmed from a missing link: strategy.

Not vision, not ambition, but strategy. The simple, brutal clarity about what we’re building, why it matters, and how we’re actually going to win. Without it, every decision becomes a debate, every roadmap a battlefield, and every sprint a negotiation.

Once I understood what strategy truly is, things changed. Hope this post will save you from some of the bumps I went through. The Illusion of Progress When velocity breaks down, it rarely feels like failure at first.

  Jira tasks get finished. Prototypes are being tested. Meetings are happening.

People are shipping. But if the strategy isn’t clear, or worse, if it’s outdated or wrong, then none of this motion is meaningful. It’s just noise.

Activity mistaken for progress . What usually happens next is a kind of creeping paralysis. The team starts to lose confidence, and the roadmap starts to bend toward consensus rather than conviction.

And instead of spending time and effort building great products, solving user pain points, or outmaneuvering competitors, the team is consumed by internal coordination, politics, decision-making loops, and process management. This is also when the leads double down on working harder, and founders regress to the “founder mode” and begin micromanaging. But direction is broken, so all that effort just digs a deeper hole.