Move Fast, in Velocity
It’s now September 2024, and it’s been slightly more than 3 months since I started full time on Gaida. This long weekend served as a perfect time for a 3-month reflection.
The key phrase that jumped to my mind is “Move Fast”.
Move Fast
This is Meta’s culture #1. It used to be “Move Fast and Break Things”, and when the company became big, the “break things” part no longer made sense and got dropped. “Move fast” stayed as the culture.
When I first joined Meta, I was so thrilled by this culture statement, since it perfectly matched the startup mentality I enjoyed. Everyday, I observed first hand how such a big company could keep moving fast. Have a new idea? Create a diff and the experiment starts within hours; within a few days, metrics show up on the dashboard. Iteration speed was truly amazing.
However, as time went by, I started to notice downsides. Many people were not pausing to learn from past mistakes, or handling edge cases. Instead, oftentimes it’s whatever made metrics good was treated gold.
When I stepped back and looked at the bigger picture, I noticed the team often ended up in a circle: a) having a hypothesis about what would move a metric, b) jumping all in and hacking things up, c) observing metric didn’t move, d) jumping all out and completely abandoning the previous effort.
This is when I realized a key question: “Move fast, in terms of speed or velocity?”
Physics Refresher: Speed vs. Velocity
High school Physics class was the first time I encountered the concept of scalar vs. vector values, and the difference between speed and velocity.
Speed is a scalar value, measuring how fast an object is moving at any given moment
Velocity is a vector value, and it has a direction attached to it.
Normally in terms of the absolute value, speed and velocity don’t differ that much, since velocity can be interpreted as speed with a direction.
But in certain cases, they can be drastically different. One such contrasting example is when an object spins in a circle. It moves constantly at high speed, but each time it circles back to the original starting spot, the average velocity would be zero.
Move Fast, in Speed or in Velocity?
Let’s go back to the previous example: a) having a hypothesis about what would move a metric, b) jumping all in and hacking things up, c) observing metric didn’t move, d) jumping all out and completely abandoning the previous effort.
Throughout the entire time, everyone was actively moving. Lots of motion. But when the effort was abandoned, velocity was zero.
If we kept the learnings and applied that for the future, I’d still consider that as a positive outcome. However, more often than not, the learnings were not properly summarized, nor properly shared. In other words, it just ended without much splash.
Never confuse motion for progress.
Consistent Direction and Steady Pace
In the story of “The Tortoise and the Hare”, the tortoise won the race. Why? It’s the combination of consistent direction and steady pace.
Consistent Direction: Be clear about the north star, and from time to time step back to check whether we are getting closer to our north star.
Steady Pace: The tortoise taking a slow but steady pace beats the hare sprinting and then napping. The finish line might seem far away, but the attitude of one step at a time towards the finish line can quickly accumulate a lot of progress.
Move Fast, in Velocity.