Have you ever wanted to learn something but had this fear of starting because there was a tiny voice in the back of your head saying, ‘what if you fail miserably’. I know I have. I’m constantly critiquing myself and the pitches I submit. One thing that helped me manage this and actually start mastering things I take on is going into it with the thought ‘Okay – I’m gonna fail at some of this, so I better fail fast and see what doesn’t work’. In all honesty, that’s really just a spin on something my older brother told me as kid, and I was scared of failing a big test. He said, ‘well if you’re gonna fail commit to failing’. I was baffled because neither of us like to fail – however my family isn’t a family that half-asses anything either. When we go in, we’re all in.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. It might sound counterintuitive, but failure – especially fast failure – isn’t just inevitable, it’s essential.
In the world of marketing operations, client management, and solution design, ‘fail fast’ isn’t a reckless approach; it’s a strategic one. It’s about testing, learning, adjusting, and moving forward quickly rather than waiting for the perfect plan that may never come. Perfect doesn’t even exist – but progress does.
Failing fast doesn’t mean being careless or diving in blind. It means quickly identifying what doesn’t work, so you can pivot before investing more time, budget, or resources.
In marketing management solutions, this could look like:
- Deploying a proof-of-concept workflow before a full-scale implementation
- Testing new campaign configurations in a sandbox environment
- Trying a new process for asset routing that might streamline things – or might not
When it doesn’t work, that’s not a setback; that’s data. And the faster you collect that data, the faster you move forward with the right solutions.
In this industry, indecision and perfectionism cost time and money – and momentum. Teams that embrace fast, iterative learning cycles are ones that outpace competitors. Because they channel that momentum of failing fast into building better plans, they’re able to keep progress moving forward. This can be reflected in the numbers as well by minimizing sunk costs, learning faster, reducing your risk over time, and creating a culture of innovation. Without this momentum, progress can evaporate and before you know it the industry has changed again.
That advice from my brother? Turns out, it’s one of the most valuable frameworks I’ve carried with me – not just in life but in this industry. Whether you’re standing in front of a whiteboard sketching a new workflow, debugging a connector integration at midnight, or launching a new reporting structure, going all in on testing, failing, and iterating is how mastery happens.
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