Just Break Things

Happy Wednesday everyone. I spent this weekend with a nasty cold so my brain is operating at around 75%. This means I may say some crazy shit here, but it also may not make much sense. (Funny enough I by accident scheduled this to post for 8:13pm, not am).

On the bright side, it is currently 72 degrees and sunny. I also have chosen not to look at my financial portfolio over the past few days (out of fear) so personally I am feeling great. 

Ever seen the Social Network? If you haven't, it's about the founding of Facebook and a pretty good movie. Anyways, as shown in the film, Facebook’s first investor is this guy named Peter Thiel. He was one of the founders of Paypal and Palantir (no one has any idea what this company actually does) and worth 16 big ones. In 2014, Thiel released a book called Zero to One. 

The book is based around the idea that when building a new product or company, going from nothing to something (or 0 to 1) is the hardest leap. Going from 10-100 is easier, you have customers, a product, and usually something that looks somewhat like a company. At 0, you have none of this. If you are lucky you have a few people that know where 1 is on the map, but you still have to get to it. You also have no HR at 0 which is awesome. 

But the whole idea of going from zero to one, implies that you know where 0 is on the map. For a mature software company, 99% of the time you know. At my current company, the last product we launched we heard that customers needed time and time again. We knew where 1 was and we knew where we needed to start from (0). 

In the beginning though, when you are starting from scratch, or finding where zero is, this can be a journey upon itself. 

Starting

Let’s say you have a new business idea, project, or goal that you want to set out to accomplish. This is your 1. When this is a small task, it is pretty easy to know where to start and how to complete the task. As the goals get bigger, and there are more things that need to be accomplished within the bigger goals, it gets harder to find out where to start. All you know is the following: 

Two things factor into the next steps in this situation. One is where/how to start. Sometimes goals and projects are complex and they offer different starting points. From here, you can get paralyzed by choosing which path to start with. Second is simply not starting, the mountain in front of you can be too intimidating and you just saying f*ck it and don’t start. Don’t do this. 

I’ve faced both these realities pretty recently and it’s what led me to write about this today. I’ve recently started working on a pretty complex project to build an entire financial web application from scratch.Yeah AI is going to help code 90% of it, but I still need to find the starting point. 

Just Break Shit

After about a day of wrestling how to start, I remembered one of my favorite quotes when it comes to building products, “move fast and break things”. The idea here is pretty simple, just start doing things. Build and do as much as you can in as little time as you can. If you break things, good. Breaking things means that you were taking risks and moving quickly, so after implementing a fix, just keep moving. 

This works for a few reasons, but it mainly has you stop thinking and start doing. You can ask a million questions on how something should go or how something should be built, but in reality if you just start, most of these questions and worries will get solved. 

At some point, you will need to slow down and catch your breath, but by moving quickly you will realize you are way higher than you otherwise would have been if you were moving slowly (shocking how that works).

Relating to Product Development 

If you know me I am pretty impatient and like when stuff gets done fast. I think some of the best products in the market right now follow this same mentality. They just ship update, after update, after update. This makes a product always feel new and fresh to the users. 

The products that don’t do this feel stale and like they really aren’t improving that much. Top of mind in this realm is probably Apple and Whoop. Two different stories here though. One is one of the most valuable companies in the world, and the other is a small $10b health tech startup. Apple can’t just move fast and break things. If they break things, they would lose billions of dollars in a day. Whoop on the other hand can, is a relatively small company, but has had a product that has been stale for around a year now. 

I have been a user of Whoop for over 4 years now and love the product, but I still can’t keep track of my mile splits on my runs (basic functionality on Apple Watch, Strava, etc). 

There are reasons these quick product shipments don’t happen but I believe at its best, a product team is lean and builds fast. Nowadays product organizations are bloated with too many decision makers that clog the speed of the overall organization. They don’t break things, they move carefully across the field as if it was filled with landmines only to realize once they get across that there were only 2 mines and they were both defective. 

Final Note

Two things here. First, although I spoke about “move fast, break things” in the realm of building companies and products, it's also a great lesson for life in general. Second, as I wrote that sentence I figured out what I'm going to write about next week. Teams and organizations are bloated. Companies in the future will be smaller, leaner, and meaner. See you next week.