As always I appreciate you avoid binary thinking. The question isn’t whether “fail fast” is right or wrong, it is in which circumstances it should be applied. Website design? Maybe, with caveats. Submarine construction? No.
“OceanGate’s CEO, Stockton Rush, lived up to his name”
Seems like a complete misapplication of the slogan to me.
You build a minimum viable product/fail early fail often... prototype/proof of concept. The beta test is a few iterations away, and the final product a few more.
The slogans work great when used like that, because the only way to know if something works is really to try it.
100% agree. Each slogan has truth in it. In context. Yet I've seen Series E SaaS companies with bubblegum and bailing twine software architecture bragging about building the plane while flying it.
Absolutely not. Build a scale model submarine and push it out on the lake/coast and see if it works, sure. Actually going down to the ocean floor is YEARS out at that point.
We don't know yet what the cause of the submersible's failure was, but it seems likely that it was the carbon fiber hull or the integration of that fiber hull with the titanium end-caps.
Carbon fiber is a fickle material. NASA's X-33 tried to use carbon fiber fuel tanks, it went kaboom and ended the program. Carbon fiber overlapped helium tanks brought a SpaceX Falcon 9 down, in a freak occurrence in what is otherwise a super-reliable rocket.
SpaceX's Starship rocket was originally supposed to be built from carbon fiber as well, SpaceX had a full-sized prototype underway, along with a factory and expensive machinery already in place, when Elon Musk had the sense to admit he was wrong and go back to metal.
As always I appreciate you avoid binary thinking. The question isn’t whether “fail fast” is right or wrong, it is in which circumstances it should be applied. Website design? Maybe, with caveats. Submarine construction? No.
“OceanGate’s CEO, Stockton Rush, lived up to his name”
I love this kind of witty writing!
Seems like a complete misapplication of the slogan to me.
You build a minimum viable product/fail early fail often... prototype/proof of concept. The beta test is a few iterations away, and the final product a few more.
The slogans work great when used like that, because the only way to know if something works is really to try it.
100% agree. Each slogan has truth in it. In context. Yet I've seen Series E SaaS companies with bubblegum and bailing twine software architecture bragging about building the plane while flying it.
The difference is the consequence of failure.
Could be fodder for an article. The Four phases of Product Development
Conceptualizing - motto: the sky's the limit
Protoyping - motto: fail early and fail often
Alpha/beta testing - motto: if it ain't broke, fix it before it breaks
Pre-Launch - motto: break it now so you don't have to fix it later
It's good. Yet it's the four phases of pre product launch. There are dozens more in full product development ending with sunset.
The issue is you don't take people down to titanic levels at prototyping.
Absolutely not. Build a scale model submarine and push it out on the lake/coast and see if it works, sure. Actually going down to the ocean floor is YEARS out at that point.
We don't know yet what the cause of the submersible's failure was, but it seems likely that it was the carbon fiber hull or the integration of that fiber hull with the titanium end-caps.
Carbon fiber is a fickle material. NASA's X-33 tried to use carbon fiber fuel tanks, it went kaboom and ended the program. Carbon fiber overlapped helium tanks brought a SpaceX Falcon 9 down, in a freak occurrence in what is otherwise a super-reliable rocket.
SpaceX's Starship rocket was originally supposed to be built from carbon fiber as well, SpaceX had a full-sized prototype underway, along with a factory and expensive machinery already in place, when Elon Musk had the sense to admit he was wrong and go back to metal.
Yeah, carbon fiber is brittle. In mountain bikes it's super light but you're always looking for cracks.