Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity

I certainly agree that working on the right thing is important, but increasing velocity doesn't stop you from working on the right thing. If anything, each of these is a force multiplier for the other. Having strong execution skills becomes more impactful if you're good at picking the right problem and vice versa.

It's true that the gains from picking the right problem can be greater than the gains from having better tactical execution because the gains from picking the right problem can be unbounded, but it's also much easier to improve tactical execution and doing so also helps with picking the right problem because having faster execution lets you experim... See more

The top reasons I see people say that productivity doesn't matter (or is actually bad) fall into one of three buckets: Working on the right thing is more important than working quickly. Speed at X doesn't matter because you don't spend much time doing X, Thinking about productivity is bad and you should "live life"