8 ms·

Move fast, but understand the problem first

306 points by d4rkp4ttern 5y ago

cbsmith 5y ago
I don't understand how people take "move fast" and interpret it as "move fast with no understanding". The whole point is to "move fast towards understanding". If understanding isn't the goal here, that leaves all the activity as little more than stirring your mixture to accelerate Brownian motion. It seriously undermines the mystique about intelligence being in any way involved with the tech industry.
- doytch 5y ago
  Self-selection bias. Clearly those who love the saying are predisposed to move fast. But they move so fast they haven't had a chance to understand the saying!
  - cbsmith 5y ago
    > Clearly those who love the saying are predisposed to move fast. I don't think that's clear at all. Many "loved" sayings are "loved" because they help spur one into behaviours one otherwise would not partake. If you think about it, sayings about predisposed behaviour can often seem unremarkable. It's like corporate values: the published corporate values are ultimately as much aspirational as actual, because the purely "actual" values are assumed. (For the same reason, if you ask someone what is most important to them, no one says "breathing" or "air".) > But they move so fast they haven't had a chance to understand the saying! Iterating on NOOP can be done a lot faster, and at much less expense, than iterating on something; I'd like to think the eventual steady state of such folks will be to do absolutely nothing very, very quickly. ;-) Hey, human reasoning can take you to some dark places, so I don't begrudge people where they end up. I'm just confused by how... broad? the phenomenon is. I'd expect some kind of Darwinian forces/selection bias that would eventually relegate such thinking to a quite corner of the universe.
    - cbsmith 5y ago
      s/quite/quiet/
- im_down_w_otp 5y ago
  When your KPIs are "velocity" and your measurements of that KPI are duly myopic, then all your local incentives are best served by the fastest random walk to nowhere in-particular. I've observed this most pathologically at organizations running the "hyper growth" playbook.
- tehlike 5y ago
  This is a good read on the topic: https://commoncog.com/blog/action-produces-information/ https://commoncog.com/blog/action-produces-information/
runawaybottle 5y ago
The key to this approach is basically pacing. If we think about a birthday cake and apply ‘measure twice, cut once’ to the actual cutting of the cake, this would be a waste of time. However, ‘measure twice, cut once’ for getting the ingredients right before baking is critical. This is usually a critique of younger star athletes where they only have one gear when they first come into a league (usually that gear is just pedal to the metal). It takes a little bit of time to understand how to adjust pace so as to be able to move quickly in some phases, and slowly in others.
lmilcin 5y ago
It is ok to cut corners as long as you spend a little bit understanding what would be the correct solution and what is it going to cost/benefit you. I have a notebook with all corners we cut at my current project. Also a bunch of other stuff (like various types of problems). The new designs are getting evaluated against my notebook. I know it sounds funny but I just can't get into agreement with other people on how to make notes of technical debt and so, not wanting to spend too much effort on it, I just made it a notebook which I am diligently filling whenever I hear something that I would like fixed.
legitster 5y ago
I get the sentiment, but 9/10 you won't actually understand the problem until you actually work on it. Work leads to understanding but understanding usually doesn't lead to work. The counter to this are stories like Stripe. Collison has famously said they never would have started the company if they actually knew how hard the problem was when the started. They identified the problem and committed to solving it. But jumping in blind increased their chance of actually making something unique instead of just another credit card gateway.
- gmfawcett 5y ago
  Not sure it counters the story, it just sounds like selection bias -- for every Collison that won big, there must be a hundred shadow Collisons who jumped in blind but failed. I totally agree with your first point, though.
  - cbsmith 5y ago
    A hundred would be understating it. Thousands easily.
- cbsmith 5y ago
  > I get the sentiment, but 9/10 you won't actually understand the problem until you actually work on it. Yes, but the "work on it" should be designed so that you progress in that understanding. Too often it does not.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  Usually the people asking for the solution don't even really understand the problem. How often are your probing questions at a requirements-gathering meeting met with "we'll have to get back to you on that"
- areichert 5y ago
  re: Stripe, it feels like what was more important was that they understood that what they were working on truly _was_ a problem -- I don't think the point of the article is to say that you need to completely understand every nuance of the problem you're solving before you can move fast, but that there's a base level of understanding you need to have in order to be effective (which is probably less common in founders/startups than most people think) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
thom 5y ago
I think it's very easy to make folksy intuitive sounding rules from almost any angle here, and none of them are really definitive because the world is infinitely complex. Move fast, but not too fast. Think, but not for too long. Do, but not too early or too late. I don't think there is a one size fits all answer for any person or organisation. I think the correct fundamental framework, which is compatible with all sides of the argument, is that you must be mindful of your learning rate. Some approaches are depth first - perhaps that depth is satisfactory to learn what you need to solve real problems. But perhaps what you actually need is breadth. There is no way to say which is right - you literally have to just stress it out, it's not fun. Some problems only yield information when you have skin in the game - there's no way to reason out the right approach, you need to push at real boundaries and see what happens. Some of the boundaries, all of the boundaries, keep pushing, take a pause... again, you can't know for sure what's right. All you can do is constantly ask yourself - am I learning? Am I generating hypotheses, testing them, proving at least some? The framework is different for everyone, and it's _work_.
- tomrod 5y ago
  “In the words of the ancients, one should make his decisions within the space of seven breaths. Lord Takandobu said, “If discrimination is long, it will spoil.” Lord Naoshige said, “When matters are done leisurely, seven out of ten will turn out badly. A warrior is a person who does things quickly. When your mind is going hither and thither, discrimination will never be brought to a conclusion. With an intense, fresh and undelaying spirit, one will make his judgments within the space of seven breaths. It is a matter of being determined and having the spirit to break right through to the other side.” - From the Hagakure
  - mrspeaker 5y ago
    Works well for a warrior (where 7 breaths is a long time) - but not so much most business leaders/managers. After witnessing it so many times, I'm guessing the standard playbook they teach at business schools is "Don't bother taking time to understand a situation - just make a decision unnecessarily quickly and over-confidently, and then stick to your guns no matter what". So much wasted effort results... but, hey, at least I got paid for it. And now I make sure I don't work anywhere where they run this playbook anymore!
capnorange 5y ago
most problems in startup like environments(particularly from my experience in social networks), "understanding the problem" is not as easy. That's why trial and error, moving fast works.
andreacavagna 5y ago
I just lived this on my skin. My team and I, 4 engineers, we focused for about 2 years only on moving fast, and moving on doing a feature battle with the competitors. After all this this we stopped and restarted a new journey focusing on things that really matter: - Why - How - What Are we doing it, and it changed everything for us. My teammate has posted the story of the last 7 years of my team today, i give you the link if you are interested in knowing more: https://medium.com/leapp-cloud/road-to-noovolari-89df7704e315 https://medium.com/leapp-cloud/road-to-noovolari-89df7704e31...
lapp0 5y ago
Absolutely riveting and insightful article, this one. Who'da thought it that to get stuff done quickly but correctly, ya gotta move fast, actually do things, but also think about what you're doing. Mind = b l o w n!
- didibus 5y ago
  > to get stuff done quickly but correctly, ya gotta move fast, actually do things, but also think about what you're doing As much as this seems self-evident, I think it's worth saying it explicitly, because I do think a lot of people skip the thinking and sometimes even the doing, and end up just moving helplessly in urgent nonsense that takes you nowhere, doing nothing more than panicking.
  - SN76477 5y ago
    It is how we are wired. To be honest, deep thinking is hard, like really hard. Only though experience do we know what is and is not worth our time (and thinking)
29athrowaway 5y ago
There is no "one size fits all" problem solving approach that is optimal for every problem. Sometimes "measure twice cut once" makes sense, sometimes it doesn't. My standard is that by the time you finish, you should understand the problem as well as how your solution works.
swframe2 5y ago
(maybe off topic; these questions are highly subjective) I wanted to get your opinion on this situation. In the group I work in, almost all the high impact projects are assigned to foreign educated coworkers partly due to their faster execution pace. Do you think foreign educated engineers in your group/company execute at a faster pace than engineers educated in the US? I've wondered if the highly competitive educational paths foreign educated coworkers have had to take is a "filter" so those who eventually "make it" to the US are a very unique subset. Basically, do you think there are issues (for non-foreign educated engineers) with project assignment and performance ranking because of this at your company?
areichert 5y ago
As a programmer-turned-founder, this is something I have to remind myself all the time... it's often very hard to resist the urge to just keep coding and launching and throwing things at the wall until something sticks, because that's what I'm "good at" and it creates an illusion of productivity and "moving fast". It seems like some people are commenting that the advice in the article is common sense, but I think when your mindset is to move fast, it can be easy to delude yourself into thinking you understand a problem when you're really just married to an idea but too scared to go out and discover whether it's actually solving something real or not.
_wldu 5y ago
Great advice. Anytime you do things quickly, it's best to carefully understand the details of what you are doing, otherwise mistakes are made and/or accidents occur.
civilized 5y ago
Do everything that is good to do, but first do every other thing that you need to do before.
mathgladiator 5y ago
After a decade in big tech, I've come to realize that "Slow Is Smooth and Smooth Is Fast" is the only way to go.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
KristianKlette 5y ago
Depending on the type of startup, moving fast means different things. For the tech parts I recommend the word "deliberate" with the motto "make haste slowly"
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mickduprez 5y ago
"slow is smooth, smooth is fast" The trick is to keep moving (doing).
contingencies 5y ago
More succinctly: Furious activity is no substitute for understanding. - H. H. Williams ... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

306 points by d4rkp4ttern 5y ago

I don't understand how people take "move fast" and interpret it as "move fast with no understanding". The whole point is to "move fast towards understanding". If understanding isn't the goal here, that leaves all the activity as little more than stirring your mixture to accelerate Brownian motion. It seriously undermines the mystique about intelligence being in any way involved with the tech industry.

doytch 5y ago
Self-selection bias. Clearly those who love the saying are predisposed to move fast. But they move so fast they haven't had a chance to understand the saying!
- cbsmith 5y ago
  > Clearly those who love the saying are predisposed to move fast. I don't think that's clear at all. Many "loved" sayings are "loved" because they help spur one into behaviours one otherwise would not partake. If you think about it, sayings about predisposed behaviour can often seem unremarkable. It's like corporate values: the published corporate values are ultimately as much aspirational as actual, because the purely "actual" values are assumed. (For the same reason, if you ask someone what is most important to them, no one says "breathing" or "air".) > But they move so fast they haven't had a chance to understand the saying! Iterating on NOOP can be done a lot faster, and at much less expense, than iterating on something; I'd like to think the eventual steady state of such folks will be to do absolutely nothing very, very quickly. ;-) Hey, human reasoning can take you to some dark places, so I don't begrudge people where they end up. I'm just confused by how... broad? the phenomenon is. I'd expect some kind of Darwinian forces/selection bias that would eventually relegate such thinking to a quite corner of the universe.
  - cbsmith 5y ago
    s/quite/quiet/
im_down_w_otp 5y ago
When your KPIs are "velocity" and your measurements of that KPI are duly myopic, then all your local incentives are best served by the fastest random walk to nowhere in-particular. I've observed this most pathologically at organizations running the "hyper growth" playbook.
tehlike 5y ago
This is a good read on the topic: https://commoncog.com/blog/action-produces-information/ https://commoncog.com/blog/action-produces-information/

runawaybottle 5y ago

The key to this approach is basically pacing. If we think about a birthday cake and apply ‘measure twice, cut once’ to the actual cutting of the cake, this would be a waste of time. However, ‘measure twice, cut once’ for getting the ingredients right before baking is critical. This is usually a critique of younger star athletes where they only have one gear when they first come into a league (usually that gear is just pedal to the metal). It takes a little bit of time to understand how to adjust pace so as to be able to move quickly in some phases, and slowly in others.

lmilcin 5y ago

It is ok to cut corners as long as you spend a little bit understanding what would be the correct solution and what is it going to cost/benefit you. I have a notebook with all corners we cut at my current project. Also a bunch of other stuff (like various types of problems). The new designs are getting evaluated against my notebook. I know it sounds funny but I just can't get into agreement with other people on how to make notes of technical debt and so, not wanting to spend too much effort on it, I just made it a notebook which I am diligently filling whenever I hear something that I would like fixed.

legitster 5y ago

I get the sentiment, but 9/10 you won't actually understand the problem until you actually work on it. Work leads to understanding but understanding usually doesn't lead to work. The counter to this are stories like Stripe. Collison has famously said they never would have started the company if they actually knew how hard the problem was when the started. They identified the problem and committed to solving it. But jumping in blind increased their chance of actually making something unique instead of just another credit card gateway.

gmfawcett 5y ago
Not sure it counters the story, it just sounds like selection bias -- for every Collison that won big, there must be a hundred shadow Collisons who jumped in blind but failed. I totally agree with your first point, though.
- cbsmith 5y ago
  A hundred would be understating it. Thousands easily.
cbsmith 5y ago
> I get the sentiment, but 9/10 you won't actually understand the problem until you actually work on it. Yes, but the "work on it" should be designed so that you progress in that understanding. Too often it does not.
throwawayboise 5y ago
Usually the people asking for the solution don't even really understand the problem. How often are your probing questions at a requirements-gathering meeting met with "we'll have to get back to you on that"
areichert 5y ago
re: Stripe, it feels like what was more important was that they understood that what they were working on truly _was_ a problem -- I don't think the point of the article is to say that you need to completely understand every nuance of the problem you're solving before you can move fast, but that there's a base level of understanding you need to have in order to be effective (which is probably less common in founders/startups than most people think) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

thom 5y ago

I think it's very easy to make folksy intuitive sounding rules from almost any angle here, and none of them are really definitive because the world is infinitely complex. Move fast, but not too fast. Think, but not for too long. Do, but not too early or too late. I don't think there is a one size fits all answer for any person or organisation. I think the correct fundamental framework, which is compatible with all sides of the argument, is that you must be mindful of your learning rate. Some approaches are depth first - perhaps that depth is satisfactory to learn what you need to solve real problems. But perhaps what you actually need is breadth. There is no way to say which is right - you literally have to just stress it out, it's not fun. Some problems only yield information when you have skin in the game - there's no way to reason out the right approach, you need to push at real boundaries and see what happens. Some of the boundaries, all of the boundaries, keep pushing, take a pause... again, you can't know for sure what's right. All you can do is constantly ask yourself - am I learning? Am I generating hypotheses, testing them, proving at least some? The framework is different for everyone, and it's _work_.

tomrod 5y ago
“In the words of the ancients, one should make his decisions within the space of seven breaths. Lord Takandobu said, “If discrimination is long, it will spoil.” Lord Naoshige said, “When matters are done leisurely, seven out of ten will turn out badly. A warrior is a person who does things quickly. When your mind is going hither and thither, discrimination will never be brought to a conclusion. With an intense, fresh and undelaying spirit, one will make his judgments within the space of seven breaths. It is a matter of being determined and having the spirit to break right through to the other side.” - From the Hagakure
- mrspeaker 5y ago
  Works well for a warrior (where 7 breaths is a long time) - but not so much most business leaders/managers. After witnessing it so many times, I'm guessing the standard playbook they teach at business schools is "Don't bother taking time to understand a situation - just make a decision unnecessarily quickly and over-confidently, and then stick to your guns no matter what". So much wasted effort results... but, hey, at least I got paid for it. And now I make sure I don't work anywhere where they run this playbook anymore!

capnorange 5y ago

most problems in startup like environments(particularly from my experience in social networks), "understanding the problem" is not as easy. That's why trial and error, moving fast works.

andreacavagna 5y ago

I just lived this on my skin. My team and I, 4 engineers, we focused for about 2 years only on moving fast, and moving on doing a feature battle with the competitors. After all this this we stopped and restarted a new journey focusing on things that really matter: - Why - How - What Are we doing it, and it changed everything for us. My teammate has posted the story of the last 7 years of my team today, i give you the link if you are interested in knowing more: https://medium.com/leapp-cloud/road-to-noovolari-89df7704e315 https://medium.com/leapp-cloud/road-to-noovolari-89df7704e31...

lapp0 5y ago

Absolutely riveting and insightful article, this one. Who'da thought it that to get stuff done quickly but correctly, ya gotta move fast, actually do things, but also think about what you're doing. Mind = b l o w n!

didibus 5y ago
> to get stuff done quickly but correctly, ya gotta move fast, actually do things, but also think about what you're doing As much as this seems self-evident, I think it's worth saying it explicitly, because I do think a lot of people skip the thinking and sometimes even the doing, and end up just moving helplessly in urgent nonsense that takes you nowhere, doing nothing more than panicking.
- SN76477 5y ago
  It is how we are wired. To be honest, deep thinking is hard, like really hard. Only though experience do we know what is and is not worth our time (and thinking)

29athrowaway 5y ago

There is no "one size fits all" problem solving approach that is optimal for every problem. Sometimes "measure twice cut once" makes sense, sometimes it doesn't. My standard is that by the time you finish, you should understand the problem as well as how your solution works.

swframe2 5y ago

(maybe off topic; these questions are highly subjective) I wanted to get your opinion on this situation. In the group I work in, almost all the high impact projects are assigned to foreign educated coworkers partly due to their faster execution pace. Do you think foreign educated engineers in your group/company execute at a faster pace than engineers educated in the US? I've wondered if the highly competitive educational paths foreign educated coworkers have had to take is a "filter" so those who eventually "make it" to the US are a very unique subset. Basically, do you think there are issues (for non-foreign educated engineers) with project assignment and performance ranking because of this at your company?

areichert 5y ago

As a programmer-turned-founder, this is something I have to remind myself all the time... it's often very hard to resist the urge to just keep coding and launching and throwing things at the wall until something sticks, because that's what I'm "good at" and it creates an illusion of productivity and "moving fast". It seems like some people are commenting that the advice in the article is common sense, but I think when your mindset is to move fast, it can be easy to delude yourself into thinking you understand a problem when you're really just married to an idea but too scared to go out and discover whether it's actually solving something real or not.

_wldu 5y ago

Great advice. Anytime you do things quickly, it's best to carefully understand the details of what you are doing, otherwise mistakes are made and/or accidents occur.

civilized 5y ago

Do everything that is good to do, but first do every other thing that you need to do before.

mathgladiator 5y ago

After a decade in big tech, I've come to realize that "Slow Is Smooth and Smooth Is Fast" is the only way to go.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

KristianKlette 5y ago

Depending on the type of startup, moving fast means different things. For the tech parts I recommend the word "deliberate" with the motto "make haste slowly"

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mickduprez 5y ago

"slow is smooth, smooth is fast" The trick is to keep moving (doing).

contingencies 5y ago

More succinctly: Furious activity is no substitute for understanding. - H. H. Williams ... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup