Think Wrong, Move Fast and Break Things

I’m currently reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. I’m less than halfway through, but it already feels like this book deserves more than one post. So far, it doesn’t paint Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg as supervillains, and I’m getting a glimpse into Facebook’s early culture.

One of the big ideas from Facebook’s early years was Move Fast and Break Things. This mantra has been both confirmed working and disproved many times – often by engineers like me, who’ve lived through its successes and catastrophic failures. .

Moving Fast and Breaking Things Works

It works because the software industry can be like a gator-infested pool. When a new idea drops like a piece of meat in the pool, everyone jumps on it. The biggest reward goes to the fastest gator that ships first and markets well. There’s often no time to make things well.

Facebook won the social network race in large parts of the world. Twitter and a few others got the leftovers. But this principle applies beyond tech giants – down to much smaller scales. It’s a form of the Pareto principle: 80% of the outcomes stem from 20% of the causes. If you can roughly identify the 20% and validate an idea quickly, you’ve already won even if it doesn’t work. You saved the effort for something that may work.

On an individual level, it also feels like it works. You get a task, you ship something quickly – it shows up in your weekly update, your team’s update, maybe even the leadership sees it. You’re productive, visible, and valuable.

But It Also Doesn’t Work

Once an idea is validated, it gains users, traction, and revenue. A bug that shows up once in 1000 runs might never happen with 10 users/day. Once you have a million users, it happens 1000 times a day. Also, one broken user profile may be easily fixable but a million? Not so much.

Zuckerberg himself cited this kind of thinking when Facebook moved away from the motto around 2014. You can’t keep patching the same issues over and over at scale. Stability becomes a requirement.

From an individual contributor point of view, it looks that profitable ideas attract many layers of heavily invested people – technical, marketing, finance, data, legal, executive, investors. And when something breaks, you’re not just dealing with bugs. You’re affecting dashboards, KPIs, morale, and your own job security. Blame becomes easier to assign. 10 of these people will know how things work and won’t blame you but the eleventh may have a bad day and push the button.

How to make a difference?

In early-stage product development or during moments of intense change, moving fast and breaking things can be the right move. But in mature projects, where uptime matters and stakeholders are many, the priority shifts. It’s more about stability, reliability, and trust.

Ultimately, Mark Zuckerberg hung that motto on Facebook’s wall – and eventually took it down. He may put it back up if he recognizes a need for it. Recognizing the moment is a key part of leadership.