Early in my career, a product manager gave me a metaphor that stuck: raise the waterline. We were debating whether to chase a handful of niche features for a few loud customers or invest in the quieter work that would make the product better for everyone.

The choice was familiar: move fast and risk a scattershot mess, or build more slowly, trusting that the benefits would layer and last. Her instinct leaned toward the latter. Don’t sprint from one squeaky wheel to the next. Don’t tune the whole orchestra for a single instrument. Make the system sturdier — even if it means some people have to wait.

The phrase borrows from the old saying: a rising tide lifts all boats. But this wasn’t about waiting for the tide. It was about building it.

In a startup, where attention is short and pressure constant, “raising the waterline” becomes less a strategy than a survival instinct. It asks for small, steady improvements that compound quietly until, one day, you realize the ground you’re standing on is sturdier than it used to be.

A few examples:

• Fix root problems, not symptoms.
  If a certain kind of deal keeps jamming up legal, don’t throw more hands at it. Build a better workflow. Set defaults. Decide faster. Solve it once, not over and over.

• Invest in team-wide rituals.
  Code reviews. Pair sessions. Documentation. They aren’t extras; they’re the infrastructure that makes the floor a little higher for everyone.

• Upgrade the collective skill set.
  Teams earn their way to harder problems by solving the easier ones cleanly. Left unaddressed, individual gaps become team-wide risks. Raising the average isn’t about chasing brilliance — it’s about building resilience.

Raising the waterline isn’t glamorous work. No standing ovations. No dramatic reveals. Just fewer fires, steadier hands, and a culture that endures. You don’t notice the change right away, and that’s the point. It happens underneath, like a tide, until one day you look around and realize you’re standing in a different place entirely — a little calmer, a little stronger, and somehow, further along than you thought.

The real goal isn’t to build fast, but to build forward.