Compounding benefits of moving fast
There are millions of ways to differentiate organizations and teams. One way I would like to focus on today is those that move fast and those that move slow.
In my opinions, there is a time and place for both. You need to be slow making strategic decisions about themes — What is your unique position? What are your values? What do you stand for? You need to be fast when executing on ideas to realize the themes.
Yet, some organizations are the opposite; it takes them x weeks to decide on a strategy and 3x the weeks to execute on one idea.
Below are some benefits if you switch this around and execute at a fast pace with relentless focus.
Easier to get everyone aligned
Imagine if you had 3 months to test 1 idea vs. 1 week to test 1 idea.
In the first case, everyone wants their idea picked because they see it as their one chance to make an impact every 3 months. They will aim to ship a perfect feature addressing all edge cases they can think of but no one really needs when their idea is picked, because they might not get another chance in the next 3 months.
But if you execute fast with 1 idea a week, people are more willing to compromise because if you don’t listen to them this time, they get another chance in the near future. As a result of executing fast, you are more likely to scope down your feature to the minimum to deliver value and iterate to get it right. At the end of the day, who gets it right every single time. At least, we have a better chance if we have more tries.
Build on the learning
Would you prefer to work on 4 features at the same time and deliver them at the end of 1 month. Or have a relentless focus to work on one project at a time and deliver 1 a week.
In the latter case, you can gather insights from the 1st project and incorporate it into the 2nd project. In this way, it will increase your likelihood of getting it right rather than blast 4 at the same time and then re-assess.
This is only possible if you work fast. We can only learn through action and action in the software world is shipping. If you only focus on 1 feature at a time but that project takes 6 months to build, then you lose momentum to maintain focus and run into the 1st problem of getting people aligned.
Increase your chance of getting it right
Let’s say there are 2 tables flipping fair coins. One table takes $10 bets and if you guess 1 coin flip right, you get $20. And another table that takes $10 bets and if you guess 10 consecutive coin flip right, you get $200. Which table would you bet $10 at? At the 1 coin flip table, you have 50% chance of getting it right. So a 1:2 payout is fair. Now the chance of predicting 10 coin flips right is 0.5¹⁰=0.1% chance. You would need 1:1024 payout for the table to be fair. Hence, you should pick the 1 coin flip table.
Every time you pick an idea, you are essentially betting that it will give you a certain return on investment. Often times, this bet includes many assumptions.
If you pick a small & simple idea, it’s similar to picking the 1 coin toss table — you only need to get 1 or a few assumptions right in order to see your result. Conversely, if you pick a big & complex idea, it’s similar to picking the 10 coin toss table — you are hoping many assumptions are right at the same time in order to get what you want.
Be rational and limit your exposure to multiple assumptions being right. Pick one small & simple idea to work on at a time, validate it and build onto it. You will increase your chances of reaching your result quicker.
Conclusion
If we all work on small & simple ideas fast and build on the learnings with each iteration, we will all build more things the world needs while eliminating clutter and waste.
