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.
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.
The status column
American project tools display the state of every commitment as a field — green, amber, red, or on track, at risk, blocked — updated by the owner and visible to everyone. The design assumes the status changes. A system built for agreements that hold at the level they were set would not need the column at all.
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 statement of work
The American SOW closes with acceptance criteria stated as testable facts — the system processes a thousand transactions without error, fifty users complete training and pass assessment, the sponsor signs off.
The guidance is explicit about why: these become the finish line, and everything else is a change order.
The definition of done is written before the work begins, because everyone involved expects the request to grow.
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.
The standing meeting
American organisations schedule the follow-up before it is needed — the weekly one-to-one, the Monday stand-up, the biweekly check-in, the quarterly business review.
The meeting exists in the calendar whether or not there is anything to discuss. Its function is not the agenda. It is the guarantee that the status will be revisited at a known interval.
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.
Seventy percent
In Amazon’s 2016 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos wrote that most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70 percent of the information you wish you had — and that if you wait for 90 percent, in most cases you are being slow.
He added the necessary companion: either way, you need to be good at quickly recognising and correcting bad decisions.
The threshold is named as a number, published to shareholders, and adopted across American business as a rule of thumb.