The Unblock Virtuous Cycle
Teams don't want to move slow — they hit roadblocks; make leadership's job to clear them and speed compounds.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 85%
Parmar's diagnosis of why teams move slowly: it's rarely lack of desire — PMs are wired to want to move fast — it's unresolved roadblocks (technical, organizational, or prioritization). His solution is a virtuous cycle: leaders make it safe and easy for product leads to instantly raise a hand on any blocker, leadership resolves it quickly, the resulting win builds courage to take on more, the team pattern-matches on how blockers get solved, and over time an organizational competency in shipping fast compounds.
Origin
Varun Parmar's approach to team velocity at Miro; he distinguishes it from Frank Slootman's 'create urgency' (Amp It Up) by focusing on removing roadblocks rather than just pushing for speed.
Core principles
- 01Product people are intrinsically driven to move fast; slowness usually means blockers, not apathy.
- 02Roadblocks manifest as technical, organizational, or prioritization challenges.
- 03Fast blocker resolution creates wins, wins create courage, courage creates more ambitious work.
- 04The fastest people aren't 10x faster — they've figured out scope, team, codebase, and success criteria; that's a learnable competency.
How to run it
- 1
Reframe slowness as blockers, not urgency deficit
Assume your team already wants to move fast; investigate what technical, organizational, or priority roadblocks are actually in the way rather than exhorting them to go faster.
Watch out Just telling everyone to 'move faster' doesn't address the real constraint.
- 2
Make raising a hand instant and safe
Ensure product leads can immediately and openly call out the challenges they're running into.
- 3
Make leadership's job to resolve blockers fast
Task the leadership/PM team with quickly resolving raised issues — treat unblocking as a core leadership responsibility, not a favor.
Pro tip A PM's number-one job is to make the most of their team by removing what's slowing them down.
- 4
Let wins compound into competency
Each resolved blocker produces a visible win and courage to do more; teams pattern-match on how blockers get solved, then solve them independently and raise the next level of challenge — building organizational shipping competency.
In the wild
Parmar observes that people who ship in one-tenth the time aren't literally 10x faster — they've figured out which part of the codebase to build in, who should be on their team, how to scope, and what success looks like. It's the architecture of bringing those things together that produces the speed.
→ Velocity is reframed as a learnable competency built through repeated unblocking, not innate individual talent.
Common mistakes
Pushing urgency instead of removing roadblocks
Every leader tells teams to move faster, but if the real constraint is unresolved technical/org/priority blockers, exhortation does nothing. The lever is fast blocker resolution by leadership.
Making blocker-raising costly or slow to resolve
If leads can't instantly and safely raise blockers, or leadership is slow to clear them, no wins accrue, no courage builds, and the virtuous cycle never starts — velocity stays stuck.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product and engineering leaders who feel their teams are slow despite wanting to ship fast.
Not ideal for
Situations where the real problem is genuinely low motivation or unclear strategy rather than execution roadblocks.
From the transcript
“the reason why in some cases we are not able to move fast is because of uh roadblocks that we run into and those roadblocks…”
“if you are able to resolve those issues then what it does is it actually starts a virtual cycle where you can actually start to…”
“it's not that they are like 10 times faster it's just that in my observation that they've figured out which part of the code base…”
From the episode
An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast
Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro)