“If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn, posted this line on March 29, 2017. The same day he published an essay with the title “If There Aren’t Any Typos In This Essay, We Launched Too Late!”
He did not say it only once. The author Eric Ries wrote that Hoffman “often says” it.
“Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.” This is lesson 7 in Eric S. Raymond’s essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” Raymond first presented it in May 1997. O’Reilly published it in a book of the same title in 1999.
Raymond wrote that he had once believed the opposite. Early versions are “almost by definition buggy versions,” and developers did not want to “wear out the patience” of their users. Linux changed his mind. In its early days, Linus Torvalds sometimes released a new version of the kernel more than once a day.
“It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” Franklin D. Roosevelt said this on May 22, 1932, at the commencement of Oglethorpe University in Atlanta.
Roosevelt was governor of New York and was running for president. In the same speech he said: “The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation.” He won the election that November.
The 2002 edition of US Navy Regulations states: “The responsibility of the commanding officer for his or her command is absolute.” A captain may hand authority to subordinates. But the regulations say this “shall in no way relieve the commanding officer of his or her continued responsibility.”
On June 17, 2017, the destroyer USS Fitzgerald collided with a merchant ship. Seven sailors died. In August the Navy relieved the commanding officer, Cmdr. Bryce Benson. The Seventh Fleet cited his “absolute accountability for the safe navigation of Fitzgerald.”
On May 22, 2012, John Allspaw wrote about “blameless postmortems” on Etsy’s engineering blog, Code as Craft. He described a familiar cycle after a failure. The “Engineer is punished, shamed, blamed, or retrained.” Engineers then “become silent on details,” and the result is “Cover-Your-Ass” engineering.
In a blameless postmortem, the engineer gives a detailed account of what happened “without fear of punishment or retribution.” The aim is to learn how the failure happened.
Allspaw gave the method a name because, as he described it, the familiar response to failure is to name, blame and shame.
In Major League Baseball, the official scorer credits one pitcher with the win and one with the loss. Rule 9.17 gives the win to “that pitcher whose team assumes a lead” while he is pitching, with some exceptions. A starting pitcher usually has to complete five innings to get it. The loss goes to the pitcher who is “responsible for the run that gives the winning team a lead.”
Rule 9.12 does the same for mistakes in the field. An error is “a statistic charged against a fielder” whose misplay helped the other team.
The win is a famous number and a disputed one. In 2020 Matt Snyder of CBS Sports called it the “dumbest stat in all of sports.” In one game he described, a relief pitcher who recorded one out got the win. The starter threw four scoreless innings and did not get it.
Who owns this? This is the first question about any task. The answer is a name.
Point person. This is the one named person who handles an issue.
Go-to person. This is the person everyone turns to for a certain kind of problem.
On the hook. A person on the hook is personally responsible for a result. If it fails, the blame is theirs.
The ball is in your court. The next move is yours, and nobody else can make it.
That’s on me. The speaker takes personal responsibility for a mistake.
Too many cooks spoil the broth. Work with too many people in charge goes badly.
Amazon calls it the single-threaded leader. Colin Bryar and Bill Carr describe the model in their book Working Backwards. In it, “a single person, unencumbered by competing responsibilities, owns a single major initiative.”
They quote Dave Limp, Amazon’s head of devices: “The best way to fail at inventing something is by making it somebody’s part-time job.” When Amazon decided to build up its digital media business, Jeff Bezos put Steve Kessel, then head of media retail, in charge. Kessel gave up his previous job. He did not run both.
“The pilot in command of an aircraft is directly responsible for, and is the final authority as to, the operation of that aircraft.” This is the first paragraph of Section 91.3 of the Federal Aviation Regulations.
The next paragraph gives the same person room to act. In an in-flight emergency that requires immediate action, the pilot in command may depart from any rule of that part as far as the emergency requires. Afterward, the pilot must send a written report if the FAA asks for one.
The rule speaks of one person. The pilot in command is both “directly responsible” and “the final authority.”
Every quarterly and annual report of a US public company carries a personal certification from its chief executive and its chief financial officer. Each officer certifies that he or she has reviewed the report. Each certifies that, to his or her knowledge, it contains no untrue statement of a material fact. Each also certifies that the financial statements fairly present, in all material respects, the company’s financial condition and results.
The rule comes from Section 302 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, signed on July 30, 2002. The two officers also answer for the internal controls that bring information to them. The SEC rule adds one detail. They may not have someone else sign it for them under a power of attorney.