Fail fast: How to stay agile as your startup grows

There are two schools of thought in the startup world. Some founders think having a laser focus is the only way to operate and anything outside of that is a distraction. Others like to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.

For those founders, developing a culture of testing, and creating parameters around how to test new ideas and crucially, when to ditch them, is key.

But creating an environment where people feel empowered to test and fail requires clear frameworks and rules to ensure time and resources are used wisely. When done correctly, this approach can accelerate learning, uncover new opportunities, make your teams more invested and motivated and help startups move quickly on opportunities.

What is a fail-fast culture?

The essence of a fail-fast approach is building an environment where people feel empowered to test ideas, challenge assumptions, and move quickly with the resources and support they need. As Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, once put it:

“If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you’re going to double your inventiveness.”

For scaling businesses, creating space for this kind of experimentation and encouraging teams to take calculated risks can unlock significant growth and innovation.

Maintaining this culture as you scale can be a challenge, though. When a business is starting out it’s much easier to empower a small number of people to feel they can take risks. As businesses grow, more structure and procedures inevitably follow, management becomes more formalised and it can be harder for someone junior to feel they have the green light to test, iterate and take risks. To preserve agility, a startup mindset must be deliberately integrated into scaling plans, ensuring that experimentation and innovation remain a core part of the company’s DNA.

Making failure part of your culture

An important aspect of creating a culture of testing and agility is making sure failure is not seen as a negative. This means people across the company need to see examples of high profile ‘failures’ and what the business learnt from them. A great way to do this is have your leadership share times they have tried something that didn’t work and what the takeaways were.

Doing this regularly will integrate the idea of trying and failing to everyone in the business and remove any shame or fear. As Microsoft’s Satya Nadella said:

“If you are going to have a risk-taking culture, you can’t really look at every failure as a failure, you’ve got to be able to look at the failure as a learning opportunity.”

You could also go a step further and integrate failing fast into your company values and set KPIs around testing and innovation at a team level. This sends a clear message to the entire business that experimentation is not just allowed but celebrated. A message that really needs to be encoded once your business reaches hundreds or thousands of employees.

When to pivot

It’s also important to formalise the process of moving on quickly, so that unproductive ideas can be shelved while promising concepts receive the resources they need to thrive. Each proposal or new idea should have to come with a timeline, understanding of resources required and key benchmarks. This way, any experiment that fails to meet its milestones can be swiftly and efficiently abandoned.

Amazon encourages a culture of fail-fast and when their first foray into smartphones, the ‘Fire Phone’ failed to compete with incumbents like Apple and Samsung, the business quickly ceased production and refocused around their popular Kindle Fire model. Moving on quickly enables Amazon to capitalise on innovation and ideas without a significant negative impact from the odd misstep.

Some notable businesses have taken pivoting a step further. The messaging tool Slack started life as a gaming company but when the initial proposition failed to make waves, a tool developed for internal messaging turned into the million dollar idea the founders needed. Being open to not just a new idea but a new proposition entirely paid dividends and in 2021 Slack was bought for a reported $27.7 billion by Salesforce.

Building in experimentation with tools

Instilling a culture of testing and experimentation can be greatly aided by the right tools, too. Investing in apps and programmes that make getting ideas off the ground quicker and smoother, means there is a clear replicable process for anyone who wants to suggest a new experiment.

The first step is providing forums for anyone across the business to suggest ideas with feedback tools like SurveyMonkey, Typeform or Hotjar. Once a suggestion has the green light, project management apps like Notion, Trello or Jira can help keep the experiment on track and give visibility to stakeholders and interested parties.

Teams may also need to access funding for their projects and that’s where a flexible business account can make all the difference — especially if the idea is driving international growth. The Wise Business account allows quick cross-border transfers so teams can experiment globally without encountering any financial friction. That means you could hire and pay contractors or freelancers around the world, without hidden fees or additional overheads.

The account also enables you to dedicate a budget to experimentation with Groups. This feature gives your team access to all the money they need and none of the money they don’t. That way, you’ll keep your experimentation money separate from your operational funds. Or, empower your team with debit cards with built-in expense tracking, so it’s easy to monitor spend and track how a project is performing.

By embracing a fail-fast mindset, startups can fully realise the benefits of rapid learning, increased innovation, and more confident, empowered teams. Maintaining a fail fast mindset requires deliberate effort: clear frameworks, transparent processes, and the right tools to support experimentation at every level. Leadership plays a critical role in modeling risk taking, sharing lessons from failures, and embedding experimentation into company values. With these practices in place, startups can scale without losing the agility and creativity that drove their early success.

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