Kitchen Side: How to Move Fast

In this Kitchen Side episode of The Long Game Podcast, the Omniscient Digital team explores the tension between moving fast and making smart decisions. Speed is often praised in startups and growth environments, but it can lead to thrashing, burnout, and wasted effort when misapplied. Through reflections on agency work, in-house roles, and working with clients, they examine how to balance urgency with focus, and how strategic patience—paired with tactical speed—can create real momentum. They also share real-world SEO and AI examples of teams pivoting too fast, chasing trends, and missing out on compounding gains due to lack of prioritization, alignment, or decisiveness.

Key Takeaways

• Speed ≠ Thrashing: Speed is powerful—but not when it means jumping between tactics without a long-term direction.
• Experimentation Requires Discipline: The best teams move quickly within a defined portfolio of experiments, not across constant strategic shifts.
• AI and SEO Demand New Timelines: Understanding how long it takes to see results from AI Overviews or SEO changes is critical for smart investment.
• Strategic Decisions Need Time: Channel or strategy-level shifts should have space to breathe—tactical pivots can happen faster.
• Avoid Becoming the Bottleneck: Leadership speed often comes down to fast approvals, trust, and timely delegation.
• Portfolio Thinking Beats All-In Bets: High-performing orgs allocate some resources to R&D and experimentation while maintaining core execution.
• Alignment Enables Flow: Teams that communicate clearly and early across departments unlock faster execution and reduce friction.

Show Links

• Connect with David Khim on LinkedIn and Twitter
• Connect with Alex Birkett on LinkedIn and Twitter
• Connect with Allie Decker on LinkedIn and Twitter
• Connect with Omniscient Digital on LinkedIn or Twitter

What is Kitchen Side?

One big benefit of running an agency or working at one is you get to see the “kitchen side” of many different businesses; their revenue, their operations, their automations, and their culture.

You understand how things look from the inside and how that differs from the outside.

You understand how the sausage is made. 

As an agency ourselves, we’re working both on growing our clients’ businesses as well as our own. This podcast is one project, but we also blog, make videos, do sales, and have quite a robust portfolio of automations and hacks to run our business.

We want to take you behind the curtain, to the kitchen side of our business, to witness our brainstorms, discussions, and internal dialogues behind the public works that we ship.

Past guests on The Long Game podcast include: Morgan Brown (Shopify), Ryan Law (Animalz), Dan Shure (Evolving SEO), Kaleigh Moore (freelancer), Eric Siu (Clickflow), Peep Laja (CXL), Chelsea Castle (Chili Piper), Tracey Wallace (Klaviyo), Tim Soulo (Ahrefs), Ryan McReady (Reforge), and many more.

Some interviews you might enjoy and learn from:

Actionable Tips and Secrets to SEO Strategy with Dan Shure (Evolving SEO)

Building Competitive Marketing Content with Sam Chapman (Aprimo)

How to Build the Right Data Workflow with Blake Burch (Shipyard)

Data-Driven Thought Leadership with Alicia Johnst