The five words have been spoken countless times by Facebook employees. They appear on posters in the company's offices and were featured prominently in Facebook's paperwork to go public.
"As most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly," Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's cofounder and CEO, wrote in a letter to investors before the company went public in 2012.
See also: The Agony and the Ecstasy of Growing Old With Facebook
"We have a saying: 'Move fast and break things,'" he wrote. "The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough."
Yet, in the two years since then, Facebook appears to have inched farther away from that "move fast and break things" philosophy as it continues to grow, with more than 6,000 employees and 1.23 billion monthly active users. Internally, the company has backed away from "breaking things," according to one report in the Financial Times last June, and embraced more muted slogans like "Move Fast and Fix Things."
On Thursday, an exec at Facebook offered what may be the strongest statement yet suggesting that the company is also tweaking the "move fast" portion of its strategy.
“In the past we’ve done more stuff to just ship things quickly and see what happens in the market,” Brian Boland, VP of product ads at Facebook, told Bloomberg in an interview about the long-rumored rollout of video ads. “Now, instead of just throwing something out there, we’re making sure that we’re getting it right first.”
A source familiar with Facebook's thinking told Mashable that nothing has changed since last June in the way that Facebook thinks about its "move fast" philosophy, though that could always change as the company continues to grow and evolve.
However, Boland's comments appear to reflect a change in the company's approach that is noticeable even from the outside. In late 2012 and early 2013, Facebook released several seemingly incomplete or half-baked products to mixed reviews, including Facebook Home, Graph Search and Poke, the last of which Zuckerberg actually later described as "more of a joke."
"Every six weeks, Facebook was making another large announcement and showing off their greatest thing and we all looked at it [thinking] these are very interesting products, how will users react?" Brian Blau, an analyst with Gartner, says about that time period.
Move fast and break things (or tongs - I can't tell) @facebook HQ pic.twitter.com/LGH4PDFkmD
— Chris Dowsett (@chrisdowsett) January 29, 2014
In recent months, though, the company has been a bit quieter, and perhaps, more deliberate. The video ads rolling out now have been in the works for more than a year, with Zuckerberg reported to be "heavily involved" in working to get the user experience just right. Earlier this month, a major redesign to Facebook news feed began rolling out to users a full year after the company first announced it. And in stark contrast to Poke, Facebook's latest standalone app Paper appears to have been in the works for well over a year.
That's not to say Facebook doesn't still move fast sometimes — for example, it developed the Look Back tool in less than a month — but more and more big features for users and advertisers appear to be slow cooked and fine-tuned for release.
"Moving fast, I think, served them well in the beginning because they were carving out a new technology area," Blau says. "But that time at Facebook has passed."
Facebook is beginning its second decade as a company. It may not be time to slow down, but it is time to wise up.
"They are a more mature company," he says. "They have to be more cognizant about each and every step they make and they have to guarantee their product success."
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