Facebook made "Move Fast and Break Things" famous. It became the rallying cry of a generation of startups. But here is the thing: what works for a scrappy team of twenty people building a social network does not work for a company with paying customers, compliance requirements, and systems that other businesses depend on.
The Hidden Cost of Breaking Things
When you are small, breaking things is cheap. You have a handful of users who signed up knowing they were early adopters. They expect bugs. They forgive downtime. They are excited to be part of something new.
But as you grow, the equation changes dramatically. Every bug becomes a support ticket. Every outage becomes a contract violation. Every broken feature becomes a reason for customers to look elsewhere.
"The cost of fixing a bug in production is 100 times higher than fixing it during development. The cost of losing a customer because of that bug? Often immeasurable."
Speed Without Recklessness
The false dichotomy here is that you have to choose between speed and stability. You do not. The best engineering teams we work with move incredibly fast while maintaining high reliability. They just do it differently.
Instead of moving fast and breaking things, they:
- Move fast with guardrails. Feature flags, automated testing, and gradual rollouts let you ship quickly while limiting blast radius.
- Break things safely. Canary deployments mean bugs affect 1% of users, not 100%.
- Learn fast from small failures. Rather than learning from catastrophic outages, they instrument everything and learn from minor issues before they become major ones.
What Mature Organizations Actually Need
Growing up as a company means accepting that your systems now support real businesses. People depend on your uptime. Their livelihoods may depend on your reliability.
This does not mean slowing down to a crawl. It means being intentional about where you take risks and where you do not. It means understanding that sustainable speed comes from investing in foundations, not from cutting corners.
The Alternative: Systems That Age Well
At Amzu, we believe in designing systems that age well. This means building software that becomes more valuable over time, not more fragile. It means making changes that compound positively rather than accumulating technical debt.
The teams that thrive long-term are not the ones that moved fastest in year one. They are the ones that built sustainably, learned continuously, and respected the trust their customers placed in them.
Moving fast is good. Breaking things is sometimes unavoidable. But making "break things" your operating philosophy? That is just immaturity dressed up as innovation.