The Problem with Moving Fast

Founders often get excited about starting a growth team because “they move fast”.

However, once founders decide they want a team, they go about staffing this team without further strategic thinking. And this can cause some problems.

The main problem is they (and this new team, and existing teams) get into trouble because they haven’t fully thought through what moving fast means.

• Is it shipping smaller features as experiments?

• Is it spending less time on customer research prior to designing solutions?

• Is it shipping the same feature some other team could too, but just… somehow faster?

The clearer you are on this, the better your growth team will perform. Vague plans lead to vague outcomes.

Once you’ve decided on what “moving fast” means, you need to think about one more thing: What are you willing to give up, in order to move fast?

You’ve probably heard Facebook’s saying “move fast and break things”. But people forget the second half - they were willing to (and promoted when) they broke things. They gave up the idea of a pixel-perfect (or even stable) product for the sake of being able to move fast.

You can help your new shiny growth team move fast faster, by spelling out ways they can get there.

(Also, allowing your team to break things a la Facebook is often the right choice, for early stage startups. Elegant smooth UX doesn’t mean much when you aren’t solving the customer problem).

What else?

I spent way too much time acting out my childhood music producer dreams using a new AI tool called Riffusion this week.

Intuit messed up my personal financial dashboards when they deprecated Mint last year. I’ve been playing around with Lunch Money as a replacement, and have been enjoying it a lot.

Worried about the economy? I rewatched Ray Dalio’s video below and it put a lot of things into perspective.

Until next time,

Ziming