fail fast
Embrace early mistakes
Fail fast is a design principle advocating that systems should immediately report problems rather than attempt workarounds that might mask deeper issues.
In software, a fail-fast system halts or throws an error the moment something goes wrong: The validator fails fast on malformed input.
The phrase extends to business and startup culture, where it means testing ideas quickly and abandoning unsuccessful ones early rather than investing heavily before discovering flaws: We'd rather fail fast and pivot than spend years on a doomed product.
- lean startupIterative, hypothesis-driven business approach
- minimum viable productSimplest testable market offering
- growth mindsetBelief abilities improve through effort
- pivotingRotating around fixed point
- startup cultureEntrepreneurial workplace norms
break things · agile development · experimentation · rapid prototyping · iteration · debugging · risk assessment · risk tolerance · DevOps · error handling · unit testing · resilience · code review · refactoring · design thinking · psychological safety · adaptability · learning curve
- business philosophiescapitalism, free market, lean, kaizen, agile
- startup jargonMVP, scaling, unicorn, disrupt, funding rounds
- coding principlesKISS, KISS principle, keep it simple, clean code, code smell
- dev culturedebug, bug, code review, pull request, git
- Lean Startuplean startup, MVP, minimum viable product, pivot, iteration
- Startupsstartup, founder, founders, startups, co-founder
fail fastrisk aversion
Preference for certainty
play it safe · fail-safe · bulletproof · defensive strategy · over-engineering
fail, fast, fails, failed, failing, failure, failures, faster, fastest