Move Slowly, and Don’t Break Things

As we make the move from digital to cognitive, the tech industry should be thinking a lot harder about putting safety first

“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

~ Reid Hoffman

How’s that for a quote that hasn’t aged very gracefully?

For many years, move fast and break things was gospel in the tech industry. Facebook’s classic mantra represented a philosophy of trying out new ideas quickly so you could see if they survived in the marketplace. If they did, you refined them; if they didn’t, you could throw them away without blowing more time and money on development.

That approach was ideal for a world where digital technologies were exploding into popular usage. Software engineers could deploy fast, safe in the knowledge that it was just code and that any mistakes or bugs could be fixed on the fly. A generation of startups swallowed the principle whole and an entire industry of consultants and soundbytes grew up around it, the Lean Startup, fail fast, agile, Scrum, done is better than perfect.