Product development guiding principle: Limit the blast radius

Guiding principle in effective product development culture.

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“Limiting the blast radius” refers to reducing the impact of failed experiments. We want to be able to try new product ideas and not worry that mistakes will create irreversible harm.

Limit the blast radius to keep product experiments safe to fail

“Limiting the blast radius” is about making learning safe.

There are two main ways to “limit the blast radius”:

1. decoupling product capabilities through the design of the technical architecture;
2. limiting the number of people who are exposed to the change at once (aka gradual rollout). For example, feature flagging, test markets, opt-in, etc.