Move fast and break things

"Move fast and break things" was an internal Facebook motto.

The idea was that if you aren't making new things fast enough that you're occasionally breaking your product, then you are really delivering new value too slowly to compete as a big player? Hmmm?

Functional tests? Eh! Load testing, stress testing, soak testing? Psh! Just get it out there, users will tell us if it's broken. (Maybe canary-launch it so that only some people get bothered, we'll use their reports to fix it soon enough.)

Anyway, other teams heard of the motto and did the same.

If it works for Facebook, it must be the best thing for us, right?

Surely it's not a thing that depends on context?

Surely Facebook didn't go back on it very quickly and changed it to "Move fast with stable infrastructure" a decade ago realizing that "it wasn't helping us to move faster because we had to slow down to fix these bugs and it wasn't improving our speed"?

Also, "Move fast and break things" was taken, by entrepeneurs, to mean something completely different, along the lines of "more disruption is more better".

Which is itself a thorough misunderstanding of initial disruption theory, but that's for other people to care about.

https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-era-of-move-fast-and-break-things-is-over