The title of this article led me to believe it was going to make a certain argument, but went ahead and made a completely different one based upon a strawman. F

The title of this article led me to believe it was going to make a certain argument, but went ahead and made a completely different one based upon a strawman. For me, there is a real argument against the whole "failure movement", but it's not this one. The problem with the startup-meme that failure is to be embraced is that it can cause people to lose sight of the fact that failure is a state you reach only after you make a real, concerted effort and have lots of corroborating evidence that you truly have no product-market fit. It's much more fun to build new projects than to go through the slog to get through the trough of sorrow. This being the case, it's very temping to quickly write off projects that seem to be going nowhere since it's now acceptable to fail, since it drops you back into the exciting mode where you are building stuff again and your imagination is the limit, both for the product and for the prospects of success. In other words, I think there needs to be a clearer explanation of what "failing fast" really means. It means fail fast, but not too fast. You really need to be sure you're actually in a true failure mode and not just a few bug fixes and enhancements away from exiting a local minima. One of the biggest challenges is figuring out a way to determine if you are in hitting your head against a thick wall or a thin one. I think this is one reason why it's very important to have very detailed metrics and data, and build in an experimental approach to product development so you can see just how much leverage you have when it comes to making incremental improvements. 10x'ing a 0.001% conversion rate doesn't really get you much, but 10x'ing a 0.1% conversion rate could make the difference between success and failure. Also detailed metrics can help reveal if there are certain breakdowns in your funnels that you would not be aware of if just looking strictly at inputs an outputs. A 0.001% conversion rate may mean that your product has no market, or it might mean you fucked up your Javascript on your credit card submission form. The only way to know is to measure.