To speed up Ring, returning founder Jamie Siminoff bypassed traditional management layers. He elevated high-potential, more junior employees to report directly to him, not as managers, but as individual contributors running key initiatives. This broke up hierarchies and increased ownership.

Hardware development is often stalled by supplier lead times. To combat this, proactively map out multiple, redundant manufacturing options for every component. By maintaining a constantly updated "lookup table" of suppliers, processes, and their current lead times, teams can parallelize workflows and minimize downtime.

CEO Dylan Field combats organizational slowness by interrogating project timelines. He seeks to understand the underlying assumptions and separate actual work from "well-intentionally added" padding. This forces teams to reason from first principles and justify the true time required, preventing unnecessary delays.

Jamie Siminoff argues that Amazon's "one-way door" concept is often overused to delay decisions. Upon returning to Ring, he implemented a new rule: unless a decision is truly irreversible (can't be broken down "with a hammer"), treat it as a reversible "two-way door" to maintain speed.

Unlike software, hardware iteration is slow and costly. A better approach is to resist building immediately and instead spend the majority of time on deep problem discovery. This allows you to "one-shot" a much better first version, minimizing wasted cycles on flawed prototypes.

The team avoids traditional design reviews and handoffs, fostering a "process-allergic" culture where everyone obsessively builds and iterates directly on the product. This chaotic but passionate approach is key to their speed and quality, allowing them to move fast, make mistakes, and fix them quickly.

Instead of over-analyzing and philosophizing about process improvements, simply force the team to increase its cadence and ship faster. This discomfort forces quicker, more natural problem-solving, causing many underlying inefficiencies to self-correct without needing a formal change initiative.

Jensen's "Speed of Light" principle sets the only benchmark for project speed as the absolute theoretical maximum, constrained only by physics. Teams are judged against this ideal, not against their own past performance or competitors, forcing them to eliminate all delays and downtime.