move fast and break things

ops culture

A mantra prizing speed and iteration over caution, accepting that some breakage is the cost of learning fast.

Facebook's early motto captured a startup's bet that shipping and fixing beats deliberating, and it spread across the industry. Facebook itself retired it in 2014 for 'move fast with stable infrastructure', a quiet admission that at scale the breakage stops being cheap.

Move fast and break things was Facebook's internal motto, and it captured a real trade: shipping quickly and accepting breakage beats deliberating while a competitor ships. For a young product with few users and reversible mistakes, that arithmetic often holds.

The company itself abandoned it in 2014, replacing it with move fast with stable infrastructure, and the reason is instructive. The original works when the things you break are your own and the users can tolerate it. It stops working when the platform is large enough that breakage lands on other people's businesses, or when the things being broken are elections, mental health, or the privacy of people who never agreed to be part of an experiment.

The slogan is worth keeping as an honest question rather than a value. What exactly are we willing to break, and who absorbs the cost? A team breaking its own staging environment is being appropriately fast; a team breaking a payment flow is externalizing risk onto people who did not choose it. The answer differs by system and by blast radius, which is the judgement the slogan encourages people to skip.

Also known as: move fast and break things

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