Why “Move Fast and Break Things” Doesn’t Work Anymore

Post by paulie_a » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 2:26 PM UTC

lowdose wrote: post #21

throwGuardian wrote: post #14

Please, someone tell the geniuses at Harvard business that no one ever used "Move Fast, break things" for chips. Having been in the industry long enough, I've seen plenty a launch date moved, and chip-respins executed in favor of risking a recall of hardware from the field. It's only non-critical, consumer/casual software/applications that can afford to move fast, and break things. Your bank, or medical records, or e…

Last October the U.S. Military replaced the eight 1970s floppy disks controlling all nuclear missiles. https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/10/19/us-milita...

Post by kmbond » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 2:44 PM UTC

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 2:51 PM UTC

_y5hn wrote: post #22

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a 5% chance of becoming a billionaire and a 95% chance of walking away from a failed startup with minor debts and lost time, the math says that your expected value for moving fast and breaking things is still quite high. Of course, if you step outside yourself and also consider the downsides of failure for your employees, your investors, your customers, and the harm that a fast-and-loose approach could do…

There's no 5% chance of becoming billionaire, but of building a business that survives beyond 2 years, probably with lots of hard work, investment and learnings from past failures.

Post by blondin » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 2:58 PM UTC

jevgeni wrote: post #25

narnianal wrote: post #5

Sadly the author doesn't understand what iterating quickly means. It's not a means of achieving greater performance in a known area, but a means of finding something that works in an unknown space. So the completely opposite argumentation would've worked. For the last 10+ years we spent iterating over several startups to find how to use this new technology of mobile and internet, and now that we have found most reaso…

Nowhere in the article has the author claimed that. :/

Post by joshred » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 3:25 PM UTC

netcan wrote: post #23

narnianal wrote: post #5

Sadly the author doesn't understand what iterating quickly means. It's not a means of achieving greater performance in a known area, but a means of finding something that works in an unknown space. So the completely opposite argumentation would've worked. For the last 10+ years we spent iterating over several startups to find how to use this new technology of mobile and internet, and now that we have found most reaso…

Well put. Concise. I will quibble though on the "now we can slow down and optimize them" part. What's happening in practice is that those startups who "lucked" into successes playing the risky-but-many game of mobile & internet technology... those startups now focus on defending their "moats" and optimising their revenue streams.