How do you maintain a creative culture to work faster without hiring project managers?

I've experienced working at very structured companies which things move really fast and projects are closed well (lots of MBAs, VPs and project managers), that company was not a tech company, but I've noticed that the output of the work in terms of quality and innovation really sucked. People had a "factory worker" mindset, just keep doing the same stuff even if things were failing until someone at the upper management decided a different thing. I came back to a company that I worked a few years ago which I love, that has lots of engineers and makers (designers, tech support with technology background). They create a lot of amazing things, but things move very slowly and we are not growing fast enough. I've watched this: https://vimeo.com/34081566 and I was really surprised by Mailchimp's culture. How can slow company move faster without hiring stupid people that just put pressure and make people's lives miserable? Can a company move faster using more analytics? Note: it's not Saas but hardware and offline software.