We talk to hiring managers every day, and the same handful of words keeps coming up: speed, urgency, progression, velocity, someone who gets on with it. Different words but same thing. What they're all searching for is high agency, someone who doesn't wait to be told what to build next.

Agency on its own is vague, so here's what those words actually mean.

Speed and velocity: how fast someone goes from idea to working thing, and how fast they do it again.

Urgency: treating a problem like it's theirs to solve now, not something to raise in next week's meeting.

Progression: partly career progression, but mostly what someone built, and then what they built after that.

This matters most at the smaller AI-native companies, for a simple reason. One person moving slowly costs a lot more when there are twelve of you than when there are two hundred.

It usually doesn't show up on a CV. "Proactive" and "fast-paced environment" are on half the CVs we see and they mean nothing. Agency has to be shown, not claimed. Three ways we see it done well:

Hackathons: A weekend, a hard deadline, an unfamiliar problem, no manager to ask. Nobody makes you do that, so showing up and having something to point to afterwards is agency you can actually evidence.

Shipped side projects: No deadline or team needed. A public repo of something finished and used, not just started, proves someone can see a build through without anyone checking in on them.

Open source contributions: Worth separating this from "coding in public," which just means your own work is visible. An open source contribution means submitting a fix or feature to someone else's project, a pull request a maintainer has to review and accept, in a codebase you don't control. It's arguably the strongest of the three, because it shows someone can be useful inside existing standards and conventions rather than only building their own way with nobody to argue with. That's a lot closer to what the first month in a job actually looks like.

There's a fourth version that needs none of the above. Plenty of people have shown the same thing in their day job, learning AI tools before their employer asked, automating a piece of their own role, pushing a change through without being told to.

None of this is a requirement. Plenty of excellent engineers have never touched a hackathon or an open source project, and everyone's path looks different. But if you're weighing up your next move and wondering what actually catches a hiring manager's attention when they say they want speed, this is it. Evidence that you'll move without being asked to.