Above All, Speed
Speed is the defining characteristic of work at Tik Tok.
Speed is the meta-value that informs everything else.
In doing 100s of interviews for TikTok, I found myself answering an unusually broad range of interviewees’ questions about the company with that one-word answer. What's it like to work at TikTok? What are you most surprised about working at TikTok? What's best and what's worst? How is the culture?
Ultimately, it all boils down to speed. Working at TikTok is faster than anywhere else any of us have worked. Speed is the Principal Component that explains almost everything else about working at TikTok.
That dedication to moving at extreme pace has both predictable and surprising downstream effects.
On the human side, rather predictably, it raises tensions and pressure between individuals and teams. It removes the finer points of change management.
Surprisingly, it provides some inoculation against politiking. Org borders ebb and flow. Things are moving too quickly to deliberately* be a prick. We just need to get things done.
As a philosophy, everything boils down to a commitment to Ready-Fire-Aim. Do it, ship it. With enough extra cycles from removing planning and inertia, we will tweak and fix mistakes. And learn more in the process.
This is par for the course for startups. At TikTok-scale it is remarkable.
Philosophically, there is good reason to suggest that emphasis on speed (and hence quantity) leads to better outcomes. We know this about pot-making. And we know that, fittingly, in machine learning, quantity has a quality all of its own.
Speed has a quality all of its own.
This obviously takes getting used to. For deeper thinkers, and for HSPs in particular, this can be especially jarring on preferred ways-of-working and directly on the nervous system.
But it's exciting. And addictive.
And an opportunity to interrogate assumptions about ways-of-working. To get comfortable working with a torrent of ideas and updates from the hive mind. To 'Yes And' more than not.
To 'Yes And' quickly.
It’s an early glimpse of where the world of tech is going. More than anything, I believe that TikTok is a mirror of where the tech world is racing toward. Looking ahead to AI and Web3 in particular - will the average pace of development stay the same, slow down or speed up?
The defining characteristic of the future. Above all, speed.
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This post is part of the TikTok Sequence, a series of short thoughts inspired by my time working with TikTok. The posts focus mostly on the experience of work culture at TikTok and companies like it.
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Notes
*People will still be people.