Analysis paralysis. Overthinking it. Navel-gazing. Spinning your wheels. Stuck in the weeds. American English has an unusually large vocabulary for the failure of thinking too long, and no comparable vocabulary for the failure of acting too soon. The second failure is described, when it happens, in ordinary words.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good
Used in American business to end a discussion — specifically, a discussion about whether something is ready. The sentence casts perfectionism as an adversary, and the good-enough version as the thing under attack.
Prototype
American design practice builds rough physical versions early, specifically in order to find out what is wrong with them. The prototype is not a draft of the product. It is an instrument for generating objections.
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.
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.
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.