Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg once said, “Move fast and break things.”
As the saying implies, making mistakes is a natural consequence of rapidly innovating in competitive environments where speed is king. But according to Bhaskar Murthy, the head of engineering at Swyft Technologies, it’s simpler and more efficient to do this instead: Move fast, and try not to break anything.
“Don’t fall into the fallacy of ‘move fast and break things.’ This is where teams can easily find themselves seeing the number of incidents go up,” Murthy said. “Incidents take longer to resolve, erode customer confidence, and burn out talented employees, which results in turnover.”
Murthy still preaches speed, though. To achieve it, he’s realistic about the amount of tasks his team can complete, and keeps an open line of communication with team members.
It’s a similar sentiment over at Fashionphile, where Software Engineer Joshua Leslie maintains that being on the same page is the key.
“Moving fast requires constant learning. In a collaborative setting, how to communicate well with each other is a skill that needs constant development,” Leslie said. “When we’re talking about an idea, we save tremendous time and avoid headaches if our wires don’t get crossed out of the gate.”
Want more tricks on how to move fast, but not break anything? Built In LA sat down with three engineers at Veritone, Fashionphile and Swyft Technologies who’ve mastered the balance of speed and efficiency.
How does moving fast as an engineer benefit you, your skill set and your overall career?
Moving fast is a balancing act. Our engineering team frequently finds itself between two competing forces. Delivering new content on a regular schedule keeps things fresh and interesting, both for the engineering team and stakeholders. But having adequate time to design the UX/UI, produce reliable code, and test it thoroughly — all with a little padding for the unforeseeable — is invaluable. Working within this duality sharpens the team into a lean, code-producing engine.
What have you learned that helps you work faster?
Moving fast requires constant learning. In a collaborative setting, how to communicate well with each other is a skill that needs constant development. When we’re talking about an idea, we save tremendous time and avoid headaches if our wires don’t get crossed out of the gate. We also find it useful to be able to effectively estimate the time a given task will take so that our conversation can be about scheduling and priorities.
Moving too fast causes accidents. When we’re juggling too many eggs at once, eventually one will get dropped.”
What are the potential drawbacks of working with speed, and how do you mitigate them?
Moving too fast causes accidents. When we’re juggling too many eggs at once, eventually one will get dropped. Ideally, our hands never get overloaded to that point, but it’s never that clean. Realistically, the best course is quickly recognizing that something has been dropped, picking up the pieces, and learning how to prevent another drop in the future. Many factors go into being overloaded. It’s not as simple as having a stack of tasks. Some tasks are sprints, others marathons, but they all take a toll. The code engine can’t run 24/7. I find that consistently maintaining a healthy work-life balance along with periodic vacations are the most valuable long-term practices.
Fashionphile is an online fashion resale website where consumers can buy and sell luxury used designer handbags, accessories and jewelry.
How does moving fast as an engineer benefit you, your skill set and your overall career?
When working in a fast-paced startup environment, you’re often disrupting the status quo. It has the potential for big impact and opportunity. Speed is important, because if you’re not quick to market, someone else will be.
Understanding this has accelerated my growth throughout my engineering career, and led me to where I am today as the head of engineering. It’s taught me the importance of strong communication skills when leading an engineering team. This is both in how a leader communicates the engineering/product vision, how this vision ties back to the business problems at hand, and most importantly, creating the space for team members to share ideas and feel heard regarding solutions to the problems we’re solving every day.
What have you learned that helps you work faster?
Understand your product vision and determine how engineering is supporting it. Once your vision is established, leverage an agile requirement-gathering process to gather feedback on product vision and direction. This feedback will need to be scrutinized with what’s going to make an impact versus what will potentially be noise.
Keep open lines of communication so team members can ask questions and feel heard. Be realistic, especially when time is tight. Finally, build a team culture of continuous feedback. Conduct regular retrospects. Seek to understand how decisions were made to create a safe space for mistakes. Creating an environment to learn from cultivates growth and enables team members to have more autonomy and responsibility.
Speed is important, because if you’re not quick to market, someone else will be.”
What are the potential drawbacks of working with speed, and how do you mitigate them?
Don’t fall into the fallacy of “move fast and break things.” This is where teams can easily find themselves seeing the number of incidents go up. Incidents take longer to resolve, erode customer confidence, and burn out talented employees, which results in turnover.
When it comes to mitigating burnout and turnover, this is where the power of creating an environment of psychological safety comes into place. Regular touch points with the team help you understand how they are feeling about their current deliverables and alignment to the vision. You need to be as invested in your team as people, showing them the value of the work they are doing and painting a picture for their future growth using defined career paths. We’ve helped create this environment by utilizing a flexible time-off policy for our team.
Swyft is a software-enabled B2B marketplace that enables any sized merchant, brand or retailer with same and next-day delivery at rates comparable to 2+ day delivery.
How does moving fast as an engineer benefit you, your skill set and your overall career?
For engineering teams to move fast, collaboration and communication needs to be high within the team itself, as well as other teams to manage cross dependencies. That means the company has overcome bureaucracy barriers and put the power in the hands of the engineers to build and ship the product to the customers faster. As an engineer, this process has immensely stretched my communication and technical skills.
What have you learned that helps you work faster?
Communicate with product and design to reduce scope if needed to deliver value to the customers much faster. Also, it helps to run research spikes early on to define tasks’ technical details.
I always collaborate with other engineers to share knowledge and get feedback on technical design and implementation before shipping code.”
What are the potential drawbacks of working with speed, and how do you mitigate them?
Making design mistakes and delivering low-quality code quickly is a possible risk when you are moving fast. To prevent this, I always collaborate with other engineers to share knowledge and get feedback on technical design and implementation before shipping code.
And testing your code is important. Though ignoring testing might seem harmless when you first start development, doing so means your code is more prone to bugs.
Veritone’s mission is to democratize artificial intelligence and build a more empowered society with its AI platform, aiWARE.
