What the Camino Taught Me About Slowing Down

It’s been just over six months since I finished walking the Camino de Santiago—a solo pilgrimage across Portugal and Spain that, frankly, changed more than I expected it to.

At the time, I framed it as a spiritual journey, a kind of personal capstone project. And it was. But now, with some distance, I’ve been sitting with a quieter insight:

I think I trust slowness more now.

That might sound odd coming from someone in the business of customer-led innovation, where speed and agility are the stock-in-trade. But slowness isn’t the opposite of action. It’s often the precondition for meaningful action. And lately, I’ve been wondering whether our industry confuses those two far too often.

Slowness isn’t stagnation—it’s attention

Walking 15–20 miles a day in silence, I learned to pay attention differently. A hot spot on my heel wasn’t just discomfort—it was early warning. The shape of a cloud wasn’t just scenery—it told me how fast I needed to walk if I didn’t want to get drenched. Every cue mattered, but only if I was quiet and slow enough to notice it.

The same holds true for our work.

If you’re trying to build something meaningful—a product, a business, a brand—you need time to pick up signal. To listen beyond the loudest voices. To spot what’s emerging on the margins before it becomes obvious.

That doesn’t happen in rushed debriefs or quarterly check-ins. It takes deliberate slowness. Not inactivity, but presence. Not navel-gazing, but pattern recognition. Not delay, but discernment.

Slowness isn’t a luxury—it’s a discipline

One of the things I’ve noticed with teams chasing innovation is the anxiety to get to the point. What’s the insight? What’s the answer? What’s the recommendation?

And sure, I get it. Time is money. We’ve got OKRs and stakeholders and launch windows.

But what I’ve come to believe—especially after the Camino—is that forcing speed before you’re ready often creates the illusion of progress while actually wasting time. Acting prematurely can send you hurtling down the wrong path, solving the wrong problem, or worse, talking yourself into a story that customers simply don’t believe.

Slowness, in contrast, is a kind of courage. It says: We’re willing to sit with ambiguity a bit longer, because the quality of what we build depends on it.

Slowness helps you hear what your Catalytic Customers are really saying

At CoinJar, we talk a lot about Catalytic Customers™—those deeply engaged, constructively critical customers whose input can shape better products and sharper strategy.

But their value doesn’t come through check-the-box surveys or “voice of the customer” dashboards. You have to spend time with them. You have to listen—not just to what they say, but how they say it, what they hesitate over, what lights them up, and where they start to dream out loud.

That requires more than a speed-run through a research process. It requires slowness of a different kind: curiosity, openness, patience. The willingness to let insight emerge, rather than forcing it into a format.

So what am I taking back to work?

Here’s the irony. I’m not actually slowing down in terms of output—I’m writing more, building more, collaborating more. But I’m more deliberate now in how I listen. I question faster decisions that come too easily. I’m a little more wary of tidy answers. And I give more space for insight to breathe before leaping into the next iteration.

The Camino didn’t make me passive. It made me more precise.

Slowness, when practiced with intent, is an accelerator—not a brake.

And in this moment—when uncertainty still dominates, and easy answers are in short supply—that might be exactly the gear we need.