1. Failure Study #FailFast History, Thoughts, and Case Studies
Sarah Harper, PMP, CSQA, ICP

2. History
#FailFast
Fail fast is a business technique that quickly tests strategies, plans and designs. The idea is to avoid big investments until you're highly certain they will be successful. 
Should only apply to small items.
Image is a sample of the IPhone prototypes that came out as a results of the Samsung vs. Apple suit.
FastFail applies to small changes in a company, - not large changes.
David Kelley in 1997 talks about “Failing Faster to Succeed Sooner”.
“At Ideo, we believe that enlightened trial and error beats the planning of flawless intellects. In other words, we fail faster to succeed sooner. The reason is simple: the best solutions to most problems are rarely the most obvious. So we brainstorm lots of ideas, prototype the most promising ones, and learn from those that don't work.
It's much easier — and safer — to bog down in elaborate planning exercises. It might seem irresponsible to start without a clear direction, but if you invest a lot of time in this stage, there's a tendency to stick with an idea even if it isn't the best one. This is a prescription for real failure. Learn to let go. Risk choosing nothing over something. The more you experiment, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you create.”
David Kelley's first creation was a milestone in aviation history: the Lavatory Occupied sign on the Boeing 747.

3. Mistake vs. Failure Mistake:
an error in action, calculation, opinion, or judgment caused by poor reasoning, carelessness, insufficient knowledge, etc.
a misunderstanding or misconception.
Failure
an act or instance of failing or proving unsuccessful; lack of success
nonperformance of something due, required, or expected
a subnormal quantity or quality; an insufficiency.
“Mistakes don’t have the end in failure; Failures aren’t always caused by mistakes.”
We want to minimize mistakes as much as possible. We want to evaluate failures.

4. #FailFast: Pros
Failing helps us learn. Examples: Sports, School, Internships, Games
By failing fast we save money and can go another direction.
Try new things with little risk.
Culture change to allow risk without fear of job loss.

5. #FailFast: CONS Can be used as a reason to “give up.”
“Failure” has a negative association. Having a hypothesis and testing it has a more positive approach that doesn’t demoralize.
It can kill innovation. Research is replaced with rapid prototyping or a minimal viable product.
Do you want to celebrate failure?

6. Fail forward? https://failforward.org/
Better framework for failure, which includes retrospective techniques to get lessons learned.

7. What does project management say about Failure?
Surprisingly, not much…
PMBOK, 5th Edition
Failure Mode and Effect Analysis An analytical procedure in which each potential failure mode in every component of a product is analyzed to determine its effect on the reliability of that component and, by itself or in combination with other possible failure modes, on the reliability of the product or system and on the required function of the component; or the examination of a product (at the system and/or lower levels) for all ways that a failure may occur. For each potential failure, an estimate is made of its effect on the total system and of its impact. In addition, a review is undertaken of the action planned to minimize the probability of failure and to minimize its effects.

9. Case study: Startups Fabulis The Point DodgeBall Burbn Odeo Fab.com
Groupon
FourSquare
Instagram
Twitter
1. Fabulis
Before Jason Goldberg struck gold with his idea for a flash sale site for designer products — Fab.com — he attempted to launch a social network to help gay men meet people and find things to do. That site, called Fabulis, launched in 2010 and raised nearly $1 million, only to be phased out the following year.
"I do not think there is much of a viable business for building a web-based community for gay men beyond dating and hookups," Goldberg said at the time, explaining his decision to pivot from Fabulis to Fab. "The mainstream sites are fulfilling the demand from gay men as gay men are able to participate on them with all of their friends, not just with their gay friends."
The move proved to be a smart one. Fab now has more than 10 million users and is reportedlyclose to raising a new round of funding at a $1 billion valuation.
And as it so happens, Fab made another pivot earlier this year, moving away from flash sales to focus more on exclusive offerings and the retail store experience.
2. The Point
The Point may not be a household name, but the service it morphed into has certainly become one: Groupon.
Andrew Mason launched The Point at the end of 2006 with the goal of building a more effective online fundraising tool for good causes, which relied on a crowfunding model similar toKickstarter and Indiegogo — before either of these sites launched. Mason managed to raise about $1 million from investor Eric Lefkofsky for his novel idea. After about a year, however, Mason says he came under pressure from Lefkofsky to "figure out how The Point was going to make money," according to an interview with Chicago Magazine.
They talked about the possibility of driving revenue through ads or taking a cut of the funds raised on the site, but then settled on a third solution: collective buying. Campaigns would only go through on The Point if enough people signed up in advance to hit a tipping point. Mason and his team decided to apply this model to purchases by letting merchants advertise goods or services at a discount that would only go live if enough people signed up in advance. About a year later, Groupon was born.
Since then, Groupon has gone from being the hottest tech company around to an IPO disaster. Mason, the co-founder and CEO, was fired from the company earlier this year after a disappointing fourth-quarter earnings report that crushed the stock. Even so, Groupon generated more than half a billion dollars in revenue last quarter and currently has a market value of about $5 billion.
Not bad for a company that pivoted five years ago.
3. Dodgeball
Dennis Crowley co-founded Dodgeball, a location-based social app, in 2000 as a New York University student. Five years later, Dodgeball was acquired by Google. That sounds like a dream, but for Crowley it turned into a nightmare.
As Crowley admitted in one interview much later, he and his co-founder Alex Rainert thought Google was acquiring Dodgeball for the product, but in reality, Google just wanted the talent. Perhaps as a result, Crowley and Rainert struggled to get the necessary resources from Google to develop the project and quit Google out of frustration in 2007.
But Crowley didn't pivot away from his original idea. Rather, he decided to expand on it with a new, independent company and a new name: Foursquare. Whereas Dodgeball had been built around texting, Foursquare took the concept of a location-based social network and focused it around the potential of the smartphone experience.
Foursquare may not be a runaway business success today — the company reportedly generated just $2 million in revenue last year — but it is unquestionably one of the most influential social networks, with more than 30 million users and 3.5 billion check-ins worldwide.
4. Burbn
Kevin Systrom changed his major at least five times while in college before settling on investment science, so perhaps his post-grad flip-flopping shouldn't come as too much of a surprise.
After working briefly at Twitter and Google, Systrom opted to launch his own project, Burbn, in The app was a check-in service similar to Foursquare, and let users leave messages for friends at different locations. Systrom and his co-founder Mike Krieger reportedly raised $500,000, led by Andreessen Horowitz, for the project, but it didn't take off like the founders had hoped.
The following year, Systrom and Krieger applied some of the location and mobile sharing features to a photo app, which they called Instagram. That app attracted 25,000 users in its first day. Instagram was acquired by Facebook for $730 million last year and currently has more than 100 million users.
"It's a hard decision to make," Systrom once said about pivoting. "If it's the right thing, it will happen. You have to be flexible enough to give yourself the opportunity to fall into these other opportunities."
5. Odeo
Odeo intended to provide users with a simple podcasting platform, but those plans were upended in 2005 when Apple launched its own podcasting solution through iTunes. As a result, the company's leadership encouraged employees to pitch other ideas for how to move forward. One employee, Jack Dorsey, pitched the idea for a microblogging service called Twitter. The rest is history.
Twitter is now said to be valued at around $10 billion and has more than 200 million users.

10. Case Study: New Coke New Coke was extensively market researched.
Introduced in April By July, CocaCola Classic was back.
Why?
Customers are motivated by more than just taste. The most grievous error Coca-Cola’s researchers made was testing subjects on taste alone. Most people loved New Coke–53 percent preferred it over old Coke–but taste isn’t enough. Consumers make purchasing decisions based on habit, nostalgia, and loyalty as well.
Cola is an identity classification. The research was completed during the height of the Pepsi and Coke wars, and consumers considered the brand of cola which they drank a part of their identification. Changing Coke fundamentally confused consumers’ identification and relation to the brand.
New Coke wasn’t a choice. The research was a blind taste test: What did subjects like best? But researchers neglected to qualify what the response would be if subjects understood that in choosing New Coke, they would effectively be pulling old Coke from the shelves, which could have drastically altered responses.
Researchers only focused on the physical. What researchers failed to grasp was that while subjects could appreciate changed physical characteristics like taste and branding, Coca-Cola also had symbolic significance to buyers, particularly in the American market. For a group that prefers tradition over novelty, New Coke couldn’t hold a candle to the continuity and familiarity of old Coke, or eventually, Coca-Cola Classic. Read more at
Some thought it was a marketing gimmick.

11. Case Study: Kobayashi Maru
The “no-win” scenario – you will fail
A test of character.
 In the scenario of the 2280s, the cadet receives a distress signal stating that the Kobayashi Maru has struck a gravitic mine in the Klingon Neutral Zone and is rapidly losing power, hull integrity and life support. There are no other vessels nearby. The cadet is faced with a decision:
Attempt to rescue the Kobayashi Maru's crew and passengers, which involves violating the Neutral Zone and potentially provoking the Klingons into hostile action or an all-out war; or
Abandon the Kobayashi Maru, potentially preventing war but leaving the crew and passengers to die.
If the cadet chooses to save the Kobayashi Maru the scenario progresses quickly. The bridge officers notify the cadet that they are in violation of the treaty. As the starship enters the Neutral Zone, the communications officer loses contact with the crippled vessel. Klingon starships then appear on an intercept course. Attempts to contact them are met with radio silence; indeed, their only response is to open fire with devastating results. The objective of the test is not for the cadet to outfight the opponent but rather to test the cadet's reaction to a no-win situation.

12. Practical Application at WORk
Do what your company embraces.
Learn from your mistakes.
Create a balance of research and experimentation.
Failure Wall

13. Career Advice Failure can help your career! Create a Failure Resume!
DON’T actually give this to a potential employer
Personal exercise to retrospect on failures in career
Use in future interviews
Failing is human – learning from it shows intelligence.
In interviews, never believe someone who says they’ve never failed.

14. Practical Application at Home
Try new things all the time!