My presentation from the TomTom product development forum. A talk on why failure is important in innovation and tips on how to create en environment where the effects of failure are minimized while maximizing the learning.

1. Failing Up
Kevin Goldsmith
VP Engineering
ConsumerAlliance Lead

2. Invention
requires
failure

3. “Anyone who has never
made a mistake has never
tried anything new”
Albert Einstein

8. “Failure is success
training.”
Kevin Smith

10. Creating a
fail-safe
environment

11. Fail Smart

12. Minimize the blast radius
"we want to be an internal combustion engine, not a fuel-air bomb. Many small
controlled explosions propelling us in a generally ok direction, not a huge blast
levelling halfthe city” - Mikael Krantz

13. Fail fast
Find the fastest, cheapest path to learning.

14. the lesson of clippy

15. “If you want to increase
your success rate, double
your failure rate.”
Thomas J. Watson

16. Do not punish failure
punish not learning from failure

18. Extract the lessons from failure
‣ yourprocess
‣ yourteam
‣ yourperceptionofyourcustomers
‣ yourunderstandingofyourproduct
‣ yourself
Eachfailuretellsyousomethingabout

20. Catalog the lessons
Create a shared repository ofthe lessons learned.

21. Catalog the lessons
Failures hidden or forgotten are failures that will be repeated.

23. “The most creative people — and
companies — don’t have lower failure
rates, they fail faster and cheaper, and
perhaps learn more from their setbacks,
than their competitors.”
Bob Sutton

24. Making failure safer

25. Minimize the cost of failure

26. Investment
Investment
Time
Think it Build it Ship it Tweak it

27. Investment
Investment
Time
Think it Build it Ship it Tweak it

28. Investment
Investment
Time
Think it Build it Ship it Tweak it
Paper Prototypes
UI Mockups
User Testing
MVP
Employee
Testing
Gradual
Rollout
A/B Testing
User Testing
Analytics
Validation
A/B Testing
User Testing
Analytics
ValidationBeta
Testing

29. Expect failure all the
time

31. http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/5-lessons-weve-learned-using-aws.html

32. Small systems have small failures
Smaller/Micro Services, loosely connected, mean smaller failures

33. Take your time
Roll new things out overtime,
watch how your users react, watch
how your systems scale, watch your
customer service queues, watch
your analytics, watch your crash
logs.

34. “Failure is simply the
opportunity to begin again,
this time more intelligently”
Henry Ford

35. Questions?
@KevinGoldsmith