😢 What was your last “fail” ?
by•
We have this approach:
When something goes wrong, or you think you've failed at something, maybe it's exactly what needed to happen!
It's an achievement, a lesson, a new direction - and definitely not a fail =)
So I'm curious:
What do you count as a real failure?
Do you think failure is actually a failure in general?
What was the last thing that went wrong and frustrated you while building?
Share your approach to “fails.”
Let's see how do you deal with them...
96 views
Replies
A mentor once told me that if you are not failing occasionally you are playing it too safe. that completely changed how i look at mistakes.
@adams_parker We have a good balance of that in our team - a too-safe planner and a spontaneous one =D
Thanks for sharing these words with us, really wise!
Building for weeks only to realize users wanted something much simpler was my last big fail. Frustrating in the moment but saved us months later.
@sansa_grey That exists... Sometimes we zoom in and go deeper than needed. Happy that it eventually saved you time!
Sometimes failure teaches us more than success if we learn from it and keep moving forward
@shivam_kushwaha16 So, why do we call it failure? =D
@adana No it’s not a failure it’s a lesson that helps you a lot in life
@shivam_kushwaha16 Yes, exactly !
It may sound like a cliché, but as an entrepreneur, the only failure is quitting.
I really like Eric Ries’s idea that a startup is like a lab experiment: you formulate hypotheses, design a protocol to test them, and draw conclusions.
I’m not sure this fully answers your question, but that’s the framework I use.
@ilyasb I loved what you said...
Maybe exactly the kind of thoughts I'd love to read under this thread.
"The only failure is quitting" - really strong.
And I liked the lab association too.
Thanks for sharing!
last month we launched a new feature without talking to users first and nobody used it. it was frustrating but it forced us to fix our user reserach process.
@sandy_leventh How do you decide which new features to add to your product?
For us, since we’re building a product for creative teams just like ours, we usually build new features based on our own needs.
I think the hardest part is not feeling frustrated in the first 24 hours after something breaks.
@jennifer_wheatley Yes, some kind of quarantine =D
Last week's, and it's a quiet one: Google dropped three of our main pages from its index. The pages were fine. Our error page carried a "noindex" tag, and when the crawler hit a page mid-deploy it got the error screen instead and took the tag at face value. Nobody would have noticed without the Search Console email. Lesson: the fallback screens deserve the same review as the real ones.
@gbasovv interesting case ! Thanks for sharing =)
@adana Thanks! And to your actual question: I'd call this one a cheap lesson rather than a fail. It cost three pages for a few days and bought a rule I'll keep for years.
@gbasovv That's the value of our failures! =)
We shipped a fix recently and spent an hour confused why nothing changed. The deploy said live, but an older build had won the race and was still serving. Now we check what's actually serving, not what the label says.
@farzam_habibi Good lesson! =) These are the kinds of things we can easily call experience rather than failures.
I think my failure is mostly due to my "create 5 worst scenarios" mindset. I usually work with the worst.
It has affected my work process a lot lately, but it is true that it was also caused by visible health symptoms, so my fear was justified.
Mistakes happen when you try something new and step outside your comfort zone. You can't learn anything new without making mistakes first. I think real failure happens when you don't take any less from the entire journey and can't see what could have been done differently.
In my case my last major failure was on a project that should have succeeded effortlessly, however it ran into all kinds of setbacks. Although I learned a lot, there are two reasons why I consider it a failure:
- Correcting the flaws or starting over wouldn't have been enough to make it Work.
- Even thought I learned a lot, the trauma drove me away from the industry, so I'm not using any of that knowledge.
Have you ever had a project failure that completely pushed you in a new direction?