Startup vocabulary for abandoning your original idea and redirecting the company. It is not a word of failure — founders announce pivots. The term borrows from basketball, where the pivot foot stays planted while everything else turns.
Beta
American software ships in beta and says so. Gmail carried the label for years while being used by millions. The product is released unfinished, on purpose, with the unfinishedness advertised.
Ready, fire, aim
The joke inverts the correct order of the three words, and it is used approvingly. The point is that aiming after firing is possible, and that firing supplies information aiming cannot.
The Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk
Before the powered flight of 1903 came years of gliders, launched and crashed and rebuilt on the same stretch of sand. They built their own wind tunnel because the published lift tables were wrong. They did not calculate their way to flight. They flew, repeatedly and badly, until it worked.
The pilot program
American organizations run a small version first, in one region, one store, one department — and write the procedure afterwards from what happened. The rollout follows the pilot. The rule follows the rollout.
Minimum Viable Product
Build the smallest thing that can be put in front of a real user, ship it, and learn from what happens. The word viable is doing the work. Not good, not finished — just alive enough to generate information.
Move fast and break things
Facebook’s internal motto for its first decade. Not move fast and be careful. The breaking is named, accepted, and put in the sentence. It was retired in 2014, which is itself part of the story — the company iterated on its own motto.
Fail fast
Two words, and the logic is compressed into them. Failure is assumed. The only variable worth managing is how quickly it arrives, because a slow failure costs more than a fast one to reach the same information.
The Agile Manifesto
From 11 to 13 February 2001, seventeen software practitioners met at a ski lodge at Snowbird, Utah, and in three days wrote sixty-eight words. The fourth of the four values is the one that matters here: responding to change over following a plan. Not instead of a plan — over it. The plan is acknowledged as valuable and then explicitly ranked second to the ability to change course.
One-way and two-way doors
In the 2015 shareholder letter, Bezos divided decisions in two. Type 1 are consequential and irreversible — one-way doors — and must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. Type 2 are changeable, reversible, two-way doors, and should be made quickly by high-judgment individuals or small groups.
He gave the irreversible kind one sentence. The rest of the passage warns that large organisations apply the heavyweight process to reversible decisions, producing slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, insufficient experimentation and diminished invention.
The framework is not a case for careful analysis. It is a case for identifying which decisions do not need it.