Failing fast

- So you got your skunkworks going, built your awesome and super lean prototype, and brought it out to market, and they hate it. Whether it's too expensive, doesn't work, or prospects say it's not worth paying for, you have a failure on your hands. Failure is business as usual for entrepreneurs. You will be surprised by what doesn't work, and also by what does. Here's what you need to keep in mind as you jump on the innovation roller coaster. One of the things I love about the culture at Netflix is that they encourage experimentation, while managing downside. When I was working with them, as long as the test was within certain guidelines, right audience, no discounts, limited downside, and the big possible upside, tests were rewarded. The focus was on learning. Have an idea? Structure a test. See what happens. Report back. If it meets success criteria, invest more. If not, cross it off the list and test something else. No mention of failure. It's all just learning. Fail fast is a mantra that's thrown around in Silicon Valley where I live. The idea is not that you should try to fail, but rather that you should test and learn rather than prepare, prepare, prepare. It's not ready fire aim, but it's also not ready aim, aim, aim, aim. If you take too long preparing, you might invest too heavily in flushing out an idea that doesn't work. You want to invest as little as possible before learning. I've seen many companies develop something over a period of years without effectively testing along the way. When they finally launch with much fanfare and jazz hands, often the product is a flop. Or worse, by the time they get to market, they're too late, and their new innovation no longer seems very new. Innovators are fast. Facebook used to have a mantra. Move fast and break things. The idea was it was okay to mess things up, as long as they were moving forward aggressively and creatively. Easier to do that as a startup than a big company with real customers and extensive infrastructure, which is why they eventually changed their mantra to the less catchy, move fast with stable infra, or infrastructure, meaning that they should still take risks, but need to isolate their innovations to protect the core of the business, until the new ideas were proven. This is a great example of a company keeping the startup entrepreneurial mindset while recognizing the unique challenges of a large successful organization. To fail well, you wanna scope your experiment clearly, and define success metrics that are small and don't take long to get. Position your experiment as a test and not as something that defines your value to the team. In other words, you're more of a scientist looking to learn than the owner of a horse in a race hoping to win. If your test fails, what's the next step? Are there other hypotheses to test? Keep going. And if you've effectively proven to yourself that the idea won't work, move on. Improvisation troupes learn a failure bow. When they try something and it ends up being woefully unfunny, they will take a big formal bow, one that they've practiced many times and often with a ta-da. It's a way of acknowledging the risk they took, and inviting others to empathize and take their own risks too. Maybe you wanna practice your own failure bow. It can help take the sting away, and make you more willing to try things that might not work.