Move Fast, Break Less

"Move fast and break things" became the rallying cry of Silicon Valley.

Then it became a cautionary tale.

Now most organizations treat it as a solved problem: obviously you need to slow down to maintain quality. Ship carefully. Add review gates. Deploy quarterly, not daily.

Except the data says the opposite.

Teams that deploy ten times per day have lower failure rates than teams that deploy once per quarter.

Not despite their speed… because of it.

Here's what actually happens when you slow down:

You deploy once per quarter. Something breaks. It sits in production for weeks before anyone notices.

By the time you discover it, the code is ancient, the context is gone, and the original developer has moved to a different project.

The fix is archaeological work.

The break affected users for months.

Now watch the fast team:

They deploy ten times per day. Something breaks. Monitoring catches it in minutes.

The developer who wrote the code is still at their desk.

The fix takes twenty minutes. The break affected users for less than an hour.

Same number of breaks.

Radically different blast radius.

Speed doesn't cause the breaks… complexity does, untested assumptions do, reality not matching your mental model does. Those breaks are going to happen regardless of your deployment cadence.

The only question is: how long do they sit in production before you find and fix them?

Slow deployment cycles don't prevent breaks.

They just ensure that when things break, they stay broken longer.

Fast deployment cycles mean breaks get detected and corrected before they metastasize.

The teams that slow down aren't increasing quality. They're increasing the time their quality problems affect customers.

So why do we keep slowing down?

Fear.

We're afraid of what might break
We're afraid we won't catch it fast enough
We're afraid users will notice

So we add gates and reviews and approval processes that create the illusion of control while guaranteeing that anything that does break will have maximum impact.

The question isn't "how do we prevent breaks?"

It's "how fast can we detect and fix them?"

What if your quality problem is actually a feedback speed problem?