In this lightning talk we argue against what we see as ‘TDD fundamentalism’. We posit that practices such as “do the simplest thing that can possibly work” and “deal with one requirement at the time” are wasteful, risky and do not encourage innovative, competitive solutions. Instead we argue that adding a small up-front design phase will allow us to arrive faster at a better solution. We advocate introducing stakeholder values and product qualities as explicit parts of the design and introduce some design heuristics that we find are sensible alternatives to more fundamentalist approaches.