Move Fast or Do It Right?

Facebook and Silicon Valley culture often emphasize speed and rapid iteration in product development. The mantra “Move Fast and Break Things” encapsulates this ethos, encouraging teams to prioritize quick delivery and innovation over meticulous planning and perfection.

However, even Facebook admitted that they needed to shift to a more balanced approach where they move fast but with stable infrastructure. It’s important to do it right in engineering; however, if you build the wrong product, people don’t care, and then you are wasting your time and money.

However, it’s not as simple as building everything fast and piling up tech debt like the Tech Debt Plague. You will get the right product but a poor experience because it will be slow, full of bugs, and unreliable.

Again this refers to the dilemma of Discovery vs Delivery. You need to find the right balance between moving fast to discover what works and doing it right to ensure quality and reliability.

In theory you could “just move fast” but the issue is, lots of companies are allergic to refactoring and they never pay the price to improve the code, mostly because tech leadership is bad and or immature. But either way, you need to pay the price at some point. If you never pay the price, you end up with a big ball of mud that is hard to maintain and evolve.

Why you need to know this?

Because this tension is constant. It’s a regular day of product and engineering teams. Being good at this “game” is a game changer for the company like Mark Zuckerberg said: “Move Fast with Stable Infra”.

Mark Zuckerberg on Fast Learning Cycles