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Stop moving fast and breaking everything

You’re not even moving fast, and you’re not Facebook anyway

Avi Siegel
UX Collective
Published in
7 min readMay 14, 2024

Photo of a broken down plane
Photo by Blair Fraser on Unsplash

It’s perhaps the favorite phrase of an entire generation of engineers, product managers, and leaders: “Move fast and break things.”

Do you remember where you were when you first heard this phrase? Maybe it was around the time The Social Network debuted in movie theaters (amazing movie btw). What lightbulbs went off above your head when your brain circuitry closed this electrical loop?

I bet it set off a fast-paced chain of events as you realized just how infinite the possibilities were without the antiquated restrictions of having to do things “the correct way”, or robustly, scalably, securely, or even just in a way that doesn’t destroy the user experience.

Just imagine (as I’m sure you did) how much you could accomplish if you didn’t have to worry about bugs anymore. You could build the most divine tool, and someone else can deal with the fallout. After all, you’re moving fast. You’re allowed — nay, supposed to break things. Let the graveyard shift cleaning crew deal with tidying up the place.

The crazy thing is, you’ve had it wrong this whole time.

4 steps to understanding how you missed the point

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Written by Avi Siegel

Applying real-world perspective to product management, leadership, agile, entrepreneurship, and startups. Co-Founder of Momentum (gainmomentum.ai)

Responses (9)

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In practice, “break things” often means “break laws.” For example, Uber and Lyft really broke the taxi laws most places they operated when they started. They behaved like a taxi, but had a polite fiction that they were “ride shares.” In most big…

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Many a UX researcher arrives at a growing company and finds it is their full time job to try and identify everything that has been broken along the way. By the time companies get round to hiring full-time researchers, that's one hell of a lot of…

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Nice article!! My take-away from this is that this is, yet another, example of the pitfalls of "bumper sticker mentality": slavish adherence to a slogan that overly simplifies a concept without understanding the underlying concept.
I think you have…

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