Why It’s Not Always About Disruption

Recently, I attended a fintech event, the usual place where you catch up with the latest industry buzz. While getting along with a good friend, a fellow competitor and a former colleague (all in the same person), someone nearby asked him how things were going at his company. He smiled somehow bitterly and replied with a single word: “Fast.”

It struck me. Not “good,” not “hard,” not “exciting.” Just “fast.” And everyone nodded like that made perfect sense.

In today’s world, speed has become a virtue in itself and we often romanticize the idea of disruption. The pressure to move fast, break things, launch, pivot, and disrupt is almost baked into the identity of modern product and startup culture. But I think we’ve started to lose something important in the process: the value of slowing down—of consolidating what we’ve built, making it work better, not just newer.

Clayton Christensen’s reminds us that disruptive innovation is just the beginning of the innovation cycle. What follows is what he called sustaining innovation—the quieter, often overlooked phase where companies improve their products, fix bugs, deepen customer relationships, and find scalable paths forward. It’s in this phase, which don’t make for flashy headlines, when long-term value is created.

Yet, sustaining innovation doesn’t get the same amount of our attention. Maybe because it’s not as glamorous. It’s not a product launch or a bold pivot—it’s stability. It’s knowing that your on boarding flow has too much friction and deciding to fix it. It’s tightening up internal workflows. It’s realizing that your customers care more about reliability than novelty.

In product development and innovation, speed can be exhilarating. But speed without structure can lead to chaos. That one-word answer made me reflect on how innovation really works—and why some of the best-performing companies often look slow from the outside. Underneath, though, they’re obsessively iterating, improving, and consolidating.

For instance, some say Apple no longer innovates like it used to—meaning it’s not launching disruptive products like the iPhone or iPad. But that misses the point. Apple has shifted to sustaining innovation: improving speed, security, and integration. The Apple Silicon chips, health-focused Apple Watch updates, and seamless device ecosystem may not make headlines (well, they actually do, because it’s still “Apple”), but they quietly boost user value and loyalty.

Disruption is exciting. But consolidation, those small, compounding improvements bring resilience. It’s what turns a product into a platform, a user into a loyal customer, and a company into a category leader.

So the next time someone asks how things are going, maybe “fast” isn’t the answer. Maybe the real badge of honor is being able to say: “Consistent.”

Because going fast is only valuable if you’re headed in the right direction—and the right direction is often shaped not by the loudest ideas, but by the clearest understanding of your customers and your own product.