How to"Fail Fast"

Without (most of) the consequences

“Fail Fast” is a lie.

We all sort of intuitively knew this, but not everyone knows what to do about it.

What companies really mean when they say “Fail fast” is “Succeed faster - without the whole project planning and change management part to slow you down.”

But “fail fast” is catchier.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

So how can you “fail fast” without actually failing? Is failing fast vs failing slowly the differentiator between success and failure? Not quite.

Let’s talk about the three-part process I have used to survive (and on occasion thrive) in “fail fast” cultures and how you can steal my strategies.

Want to fail faster through this newsletter? I’m going to chat about forecasting and pivoting. If you’re still curious enough to keep reading, then let’s do this thing.

How to Succeed at Failing Fast

I’m going to assume, for the purpose of this newsletter, that you have a project that you want to launch. This is a project that has to be launched quickly without a typical project plan and realistically you aren’t a change manager or even a project manager.

That’s OK - you don’t have to be either to understand and follow this method.

1. Forecast Failure: Find the ways in which your initiative will possibly fail with a high-level change management effort and project pre-mortem.

2. Pivot Fast: Once you identify the potential failure scenarios, identify the biggest potential obstacles and rank them by hardest / most boring to overcome.

3. Stick the Landing: Decide when (and how) to give up. Or, how to celebrate!

How to Forecast Failure:

Forecasting failure involves very little actual forecasting on your part.

Instead, it’s about talking to as many important people as you can find as fast as possible. You want to determine how much chaos you will be sending their way and all the ways it will make your + their life difficult.

This is where your people skills will shine, and if you aren’t yet confident in your people skills, you can steal my handy dandy script.

• Step 1: List everyone who will be impacted by this change.

  • The most often forgotten departments in big changes are Legal, Compliance, and Marketing. Do them a favor and check with them too.

• Step 2: Send a quick note asking what happens if you launch your change.

  • “Hey [Person’s Name]. I have a project I want to launch and I want your thoughts on:

    • 1) Is this feasible?

    • 2) What problems do you expect this to create for your team?

    • 3) What problems do you expect this to create for other teams?

    • 4) What is the shortest amount of time you can get this done?

    • 5) What is the biggest risk of us trying to do it faster?

    • 6) When we launch this what do you think will break?”

• Step 3: Have their responses convinced you not to do the project?

  • If yes - Congrats! You failed fast without really starting other than sending a few Slack messages.

  • If no - Let’s keep expending energy and time and move to the next step.

How to Pivot Fast:

Now that you have a rough plan from your quick chats with each impacted function, you also have to figure out when to cut and run from this project.

The “fast” part of “fail fast” is about minimizing the amount of time / effort / cost to identify when an initiative will fail and cutting losses as soon as gains seem unrealistic. This step will involve identifying which roadblocks aren’t worth fixing.

• Step 1: Remember your chats with your colleagues? Make a spreadsheet and list all of their risks and things that will break.

• Step 2: Rank this list objectively by a back of the napkin guess on cost / effort to overcome the issue. Remember the total cost of overcoming every obstacle shouldn’t exceed the potential project benefit.

• Step 3: Rank this list subjectively by how much you care about fighting for this project knowing you decided to proceed and now own the some of the upside AND the downside risk of failure.

• Step 4: Add the total cost of fighting the risks and issues. Is the project still expected to make money? Are you still excited to launch this project?

  • If no - Congrats! You failed fast with only slightly more effort and can prove why the project shouldn’t even start.

  • If no - Good for you! Let’s not quit while we’re ahead - yet.

How to Stick the Landing:

I absolutely want you to be successful in this project and become the person leadership refers to glowingly in Town Halls when they talk about their increased expectations for everyone to take the risk of failing fast in more projects. Your success in this just means more of these scrappy projects - but that’s a topic for another day. How do you stick the landing?

Cutting losses is expensive the more time and effort you sink into a project. The sunk cost fallacy is strong and the more time and effort you expend on this the more people leadership will expect this project to deliver. But remember that list we made of the cost of things? You’ll need that now.

Divide your project into phases based on each potential roadblock in the order of likely occurrence. As you move past each, figure out what talking point you would want to make if you can’t get past it (or it takes longer than expected and the return on investment math no longer… maths.)

Maybe it is easier than you expected and say, skipping pre-launch training in favor of post-launch bug reporting is worth the trade off. Or maybe there is another project you hadn’t heard of and all engineering resources get realigned and there is nobody to code your MVP?

Both could happen - knowing when to cut and run will come down to you talking to the relevant team leader and seeing the likelihood of getting back on track.

If the Project Fails:

Send a thank you note to everyone involved and do a write-up that you share with the execs about how much work everyone put in and if any of their efforts can be salvaged for a future project. Then book a PTO day and take a break.

If the Project Succeeds:

Celebrate - and prepare yourself to be rewarded with launching more “fail fast” projects in the future. But also hopefully you get a raise and a promotion!

If you liked this newsletter tell your friends about it! I genuinely enjoy getting a chance to write about my experiences and I would love to make some friends along the way. Let me know your thoughts in the comments and have the best day!