Revisiting The Build Fast, Fail Fast Philosophy!
Modern day tech organization have championed the philosophy of build fast and fail fast. They have proven that it is better to build a product fast with acceptable flaws and put it in customer’s hand. Receive the customer’s feedback and take a call.
If the customer finds it useful for their problem, companies scale the resources and weed out the flaws to build a scalable product. If not, then junk the product and build something else. Thus, minimizing the risk of wasting resources and time on an idea that wasn’t worth solving the customer’s problem.
As it happens with all the ideas that work, it gets extrapolated on most problems without putting in the required thought. It is important to look deeper into the philosophy of building fast and failing fast. Especially for modern entrepreneurs, it is important to distinguish what should be build fast and what should not. I am not saying that we rewind the clock and go back to the waterfall model days. That will be a recipe for business failure.
Here is what I think. I think the product should be classified as core and utility products. I will take an example of an EV to explain what I meant with Core and Utility products.
a. Core Products: To define it loosely, core products are the engine and essential products that run your business. In the context of an EV, it would be the engines and batteries. Unless you build a right engine and an efficient battery to run the entire EV, you can’t build a successful EV. That takes time to build. It will take multiple iteration, safety checks, real world scenario checks and environment checks. You can’t say, let’s build, an engine and battery, fast. It will be a road to a certain disaster. Similarly post MVP and PMT, it is imperative that you build the core of your business that can sustain the growth. It is critical to identify which are the core of your products, debate the right tech stack, build and iterate for a scalable product. This takes time to build. Building fast and failing fast might not be a good strategy for your core products.
b. Utility Products: I would define the utility product as a customer experience product. These are the products that makes your core product look awesome, it differentiates you from your competitor. In case of an EV, how is the comfort of your vehicle? how is the driving experience? how does the design look? How many color variants are available? What are utility use cases? These are the important features where one can experiments faster and gain customer feedbacks. Once you have your core sorted, you can build differentiating feature and get customers’ feedback. You can scale or dump a utility product based on the market response.
Once a business has built a scalable core product, it provides leverage to experiment faster with experience and utility. Without a stable and scalable core product, team will be in a permanent state of firefighting.
The time you aspire to save while building fast, will be wasted in sorting out unending bugs.
