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

https://hbr.org/2019/12/why-move-fast-and-break-things-doesnt-work-anymore

by poliX • 7 years ago

161 119 7 years ago

hbr.org

squeezingswirls• 7 years ago

Original, and full article at https://hbr.org/2019/12/why-move-fast-and-break-things-doesn...

dmitriid2• 7 years ago

Did it ever work?

hobofan2• 7 years ago

Ask Mark Zuckerberg, Travis Kalanick or Brian Chesky.

joosters• 7 years ago

It might have worked for Travis Kalanick, but can we really say that it worked for Uber?

_y5hn2• 7 years ago

It worked for the 5% survivors.

jeffrey_garand• 7 years ago

Moving fast has different interpretations if you're a turtle, elephant, or cheetah.

RodgerTheGreat• 7 years ago

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 for the public at large, or the environment, (or other externalities, depending on your business) it starts to get less attractive.

Being a sociopath who is "only looking out for #1" is a big advantage in business!

taneq• 7 years ago

4. Regulators and the public have both grown increasingly alert for 'fake it til you make it' gambits. Regulators are more likely to intervene when companies create a public hazard (eg. Theranos, Uber's self driving program) or skirt legality with their business models (Uber, again, hmm.) The public is more likely to cynically exploit loss-leader behaviour and then jump ship once the company tries to turn a profit.

narnianal• 7 years ago

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 reasonable usecases we can slow down and optimize them.

On the other hand there are always areas we don't know much about, like in the areas of shared knowledge, in the niches. There of course quick iteration continues to be the way to go.

supersrdjan• 7 years ago

I agree. If anything, tinkering and iterating is the best approach to deal with complexity, which the author says will emerge from the new technology.

blondin2• 7 years ago

oh yea... for next sprint, let's green-blue roll out the update for this new cancer treatment and a/b test it on some patients so we can iterate.

netcan2• 7 years ago

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.

joshred• 7 years ago

Hey quibbler, you defend a castle (not a moat).

jevgeni7• 7 years ago

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

blondin2• 7 years ago

totally agree. i don't know... maybe we are all getting linked to different articles.

mkl2• 7 years ago

From the article: "Shift 2: From Rapid Iteration to Exploration"

But rapid iteration is the most efficient means of exploration for many areas. Exploration is the reason many people use the "move fast and break things" rapid iteration strategy.

stiray• 7 years ago

My answer would be: as the things are so broken, that I sometimes wonder how anything still works. Flawed cpus, memory, motherboards, operating systems, hardware, not to even go into userspace/web software full of lasigna frameworks that are buggy as hell even on then own and once you put all that into gulash called modern software... Its a small miracle on its own.

xrisk• 7 years ago

the saving grace is probably the fact that our hardware is pretty well designed and so are the core components of our operating systems

matwood• 7 years ago

Not just well designed, but many core components have been iterated on for decades at this point.

crdoconnor2• 7 years ago

On the plus side, there wouldn't be nearly as much work for us developers if everything just "worked".

vsareto• 7 years ago

It seems miraculous because people calling stuff "broken" on the internet are often greatly exaggerating

kerpele• 7 years ago

I think the big issue with companies like Facebook is not that their development model moves too quickly for them to be able to react to their issues but that they simply don’t care. Facebook has known about the issues with privacy, hyper targeted advertising etc for years. You don’t need to move very fast to react to a fundamental issue in that timeframe.

crdoconnor2• 7 years ago

Areas where big companies don't care are often ripe for new disruptive products. Google's success can largely be attributed to building a feature that the 400 pound gorilla of the time (yahoo) didn't give a fuck about.

hrktb• 7 years ago

consumers need to care as well, and that is/was the issue for privacy or ethical behavior. I hope we got passed that point, but it sure takes a damn long time.

ori_b3• 7 years ago

You call it an issue. We call it a revenue stream.

asveikau3• 7 years ago

And here's another point where we may disagree: money is not a thing to be worshiped at the cost of everything else.

kinkrtyavimoodh• 7 years ago

Or perhaps they do know exactly how much consumers care about these issues (spoiler: not much), and are simply building for their consumers. The few hundred / thousand people flooding Twitter and opinion columns don't speak for the 2 billion people who use Facebook.

throwGuardian• 7 years ago

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 even traffic light controls simply cannot move fast and break

heavenlyblue• 7 years ago

They probably did though. Except the ones who survived didn’t? :)

lowdose• 7 years ago

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...

paulie_a2• 7 years ago

They had no need to upgrade. If anything they had a massive need to downsize the inventory of weapons. Plus the security protection was shockingly irresponsible. The code was all zeros

jevgeni7• 7 years ago

The geniuses at HBR never claimed in the article that it applies to chips. The article says that increase in chip performance lead to a prevalent strategy in business (mainly tech) to be the first.

ryguytilidie5• 7 years ago

Its crazy how tribalistic HN has become. The whole Boeing fiasco has produced SO MANY "gosh, all those MBAs are at fault. I assign 0 fault to the engineers!" and every. single. time. There is a problem relating to a management/engineering decision, blame from HN ALWAYS goes to "the MBA types" and very literally never to engineering.

I guess I just don't understand what the point of this type of tribalism is? Feeling better about your team while lamenting how everyone else is stupid seems pretty unhealthy.

mytailorisrich3• 7 years ago

"Move fast, break things" works well when iterating quickly and cheaply in an unknown space.

Chip design is not one of those cases.

bumby7• 7 years ago

To the OP’s point, I think the claim is that this doesn’t work well if the unknown space is safety critical.

Frost1x• 7 years ago

Your bank, or medical records, or even traffic light controls simply cannot move fast and break

Don't tell the banks and financial industry that (looking at you, Equifax).

ben5092• 7 years ago

At least in finance it's more "move slowly and hope no one notices it's broken."

stazz1• 7 years ago

I believe that is a remarkable case of moving so slowly that everything broke anyway.

KineticLensman• 7 years ago

TFA has lots of 'ideal world' assumptions that are a real hostage to fortune, e.g.

This new era, on the other hand, will be one of mass collaboration in which government partners with academia and industry to explore new technologies in the pre-competitive phase

. ...

That’s why we can expect the basis of competition to shift away from design sprints, iterating, and pivoting to building meaningful relationships in order to solve grand challenges. Power in this new era will not sit at the top of industrial hierarchies, but will emanate from the center of networks and ecosystems

Not sure if the FAANG-likes will see it like that.

ChrisMarshallNY3• 7 years ago

I don't think it ever worked that well, but I have also always followed a different muse than the current zeitgeist.

I think that SpaceX is living proof that you can move very fast indeed, without breaking things.

As we well know, they do, very rarely, break things (with great video), but when that happens; it only happens once.

jacquesm2• 7 years ago

That's about as nice an example of survivorship bias as you could find. SpaceX came within a whisker of ceasing to exist. If that one launch had failed it would have been game over for them. But they got lucky that time and they have done a fantastic job at keeping their eye on the ball ever since. Every business has one or more of those critical moments in time when things just have to go your way. If you are in a business where breaking things is your only option to succeed at all then you should. SpaceX gambled and won, and breaking things is still the way of the world in rocketry and likely will be for some time.

ChrisMarshallNY3• 7 years ago

Point taken, but they also don't keep breaking the same things, over and over; simply because it is not cost-effective to avoid the breakage.

Makes business sense, but I've always been one of these knuckleheads that wants to write great code; simply because I like to do it.

I got into the habit of practicing zero-tolerance on quality. I've never found any level of breakage acceptable in my own work. I literally get physically uncomfortable when I know there's a bug in my code, and I have been known to get out of bed at 2AM, and go downstairs to fix it.

I know that I'm fortunate to be in a place where I am free to do that. I don't need to run in the rat race.

docuru• 7 years ago

In my opinion, there are many companies that “move fast and break things”. It happens on the early days.

Once they grow big, they can’t afford to move quick. And breaking things seems dangerous.

So it does works. But depending on the stage the company at

kmbond• 7 years ago

It never did

exabrial• 7 years ago

It only has ever worked if you have a monopoly or plenty of cash to burn. If you can test in production and your user base can absorb errors/inconsistent behavior, it's the path to finding new verticals.

K0SM0S• 7 years ago

I move that the article definitely touches upon a critical topic but fails to nail it due to a too-narrow yet too-peripheral account.

Consider this:

Over the coming decades, however, agility will take on a new meaning: the ability to explore multiple domains at once and combine them into something that produces value. We’ll need computer scientists working with cancer scientists, for example, to identify specific genetic markers that could lead to a cure. To do this, we’ll need to learn how to go slower to have a greater impact.

This "working with, across domains" mantra underlies the entire article. It's called transdisciplinarity — if not of individuals, of teams.

Guess what. That's how we've done any sector for the longest of times. You start with self-made specialists, they grow the field, which then touches other fields, and before you know it, a "normal" business has several functions: accounting, sales, legal, marketing, production, etc.

Tech is new, and tech is geeky — the greatest among us estimate that no more than 1~5% of the population has enough interest to enter and remain in the field.

Transdisciplinarity is usually a major key to unlock hard problems, indeed. As more and more engineers enter the tech field coming from previous careers, armed with domain knowledge, the quality and "relevance" of tech features improves, no doubt about it — I think music and the arts in general, observed over the last 50 years or so, is a strong illustration of that.

These new technologies are far too complex for anyone to develop on their own. That’s why we can expect the basis of competition to shift away from design sprints, iterating, and pivoting to building meaningful relationships in order to solve grand challenges.

This literally confuses goals with methods. Agile never told you what to do or why you do it, it's just a "small method for small teams to work better/faster, to manage complexity". Grand challenges don't get automagically solved because they're big and involve many people from many fields.

The "far too complex for anyone to develop on their own" part is more telling of a philosophical bias: we tend to either see the world as "too complicated to be explained" (as the HR author) or "too simple to be worth wasting time to intellectualize it" (this is the general entrepreunarial mindset, to go at things from action even if it's not entirely clear mentally; the opposite mindset, which is mine, is more of a research ethos, an observer / thinker.)

Transdisciplinarity is also not a new thing. It's just the latest trend to kick in on the road to progress, it's a pendulum from hyper-specialization (high verticals) to holistic solutions (big horizontals).

Consider philosophy, human beings sprouting ideas, software engineering for the mind. An idea appears somewhere, in a group, in some space-time. It starts localized, vertical. The taller is gets (i.e. the highest its worth and the strongest its implementation, its relevant rooting at many levels of the stack), the wider it may eventually resonate, spread, horizontally towards other fields, other domains, other spacetimes and cultures. "Don't kill thy neighbor" is kind of such a piece of software that most of us have installed. But look how philosophy generates ideas: usually not in isolation, rather from looking at the world. The best philosophers, imho, are those who speak from experience (typically not career-philosophers, rather doers, goers, people who act and only then speak).

Case in point: after a few thousand years of thinking and transmission, philosophy is part of everything we do, are.

Technology (in the current modern sense, computing, electronics, etc) is like that, it's a big vertical with tremendous horizontal reach. It will become, like philosophy, like any valuable improvement to human condition, a massively transdisciplinary activity.

jknoepfler• 7 years ago

"Move fast, break things" never worked in any meaningful way, especially in AWS. It's a garbage philosophy repeated by idiots who don't support business applications driven by software on a global (enterprise, mission critical, always-on) scale. Literally no one at Amazon practices this idea, except the idiots who think that launching pre-alpha garbage into production because of poorly conceived re:invent promises is an acceptable business model that builds customer trust (spoilers, it doesn't). Source: worked there, did that.

sethgibbons• 7 years ago

Anymore? Did it ever?

whoisthemachine• 7 years ago

I always took this to mean break your unit tests and fix them before anyone else notices, but that just may be the software developer in me.

tomasGiden• 7 years ago

Whenever I see articles like this or about frameworks like the Cynefin framework I cannot help but to see it like any mathematical optimization problem. If the solution is simple to see you just jump to the solution. If it is more complicated but you have good practices / know the gradient (“know in what direction you are going”) and the problem is well behaved, you can iterate quickly and reach and expect to find an optimum. But if it is more complex and you don’t know I what direction to go / don’t have a gradient you need to do try lots of different experiments in parallel also.

And the more costly an iteration is the more important it is with multiple perspectives to get as much data into the different experiments from the beginning as opposed to randomly selecting things to try out and seeing what happens.

softwaredoug• 7 years ago

Move fast/break things works great when the risks associated with the “breaking” are minuscule, experiments can be measured and isolated, and the upside for experimentation high (UI tweaks, recsys or search algo improvements, social media, etc).

Move slow, keep things working works well when breaking things has a huge downside and safe experimentation on live customers near impossible. Such as medicine, legal compliance, building airplanes, utilities.

AzzieElbab• 7 years ago

I always used "move fast and break things" as an excuse to dump legacy soft

kwhitefoot• 7 years ago

Did it ever? And if so for what value of 'work'?

ElFitz• 7 years ago

With every new generation of chips came new possibilities and new applications. The firms that developed those applications the fastest won.

Initially, I was really disappointed in this article. Facebook, on the client-side, was 'possible' on a Pentium 4. Perhaps a III.

Internet speeds where sufficient in the early 2000's, and MySpace was created a year before Facebook. We all know who won.

I really had a hard time seeing what "chip generations" or "being first" had to do with any of it.

Sure, powerful enough hardware is a pre-requisite. But... I couldn't see any correlation between generations of products / services and CPU power.

In my mind, if there was a correlation to be had, it'd rather have been between said generations of products / services and, first internet speed, and then internet adoption.

And Moore's law didn't have much to do with it.

Then, it hit me. I was on the wrong time scale. He's talking decades. We're not looking at the 20 or even 30 years, but at the last 60 or 70 years.

So, yes, he still misses the entire "internet tipping point", with the associated paradigm shift, that is probably just as important as his precious Moore's law.

But he's also right on how it enabled the Mainframe -> PC -> Smartphone transitions.

Although I still don't believe in the theory that being first matters that much.

Who here remembers Microsoft's UMPCs? Or Intel's MIDs? Or the first third-party iPhone app?

... he does make a point. But I don't know what to make of the whole thing, really.

acd• 7 years ago

Hopefully this ends open Office spaces trend. I hope that there be a resurgence of private offices again. Cross discipline cross company cooperation sounds interesting.

I also tends to think that the move fast and break things builds technical debt. As such as there is a need for a cross between agile and a more planned approach.

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

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