You can’t move fast forever. Period.
I learned this hard lesson in the world of AAA video games and sports news websites. You work toward the crunch because football season won’t wait on us, the Masters won’t postpone for us. But that comes with the understanding that you won’t ship everything you designed (no matter how much you want to).
I personally shipped 13 products in 4 years watching this cycle happen. The key is understanding that the crunch of alpha is about fixing what you built, cleaning it up, tightening it, and removing the stuff you can’t get done. The crunch is not about building anymore.
I found that for my LiveOps team I had to develop a different cadence (and teach the rest of the teams why). We didn’t alpha when the dev team did - because we didn’t get to break after release (you know, traffic!). We worked our breaks into different places, different ways. But the general idea is always the same: constant high-speed development is a recipe for burnout.
After you ship, you step back. This isn’t just downtime - it’s creative time. Time to design the next thing with fresh energy and excitement. Not crunch time, but rebuild time.
The magic happens in the pauses, in the moments between sprints. When you can take a breath, look back, and start imagining what’s next.
Make sure your schedule still has air for your team to breathe.