Some organisms, like mice, salmon, and dandelions, have lots of children in a litter. This is correlated with those children (or eggs or seeds) having little parental maintenance, small body size, short-lived as adults, not particularly robust, having a low probability of any individual one reaching maturity. Others have small litters or even just a single child, tend to large body size, long life expectancy, and lots of time and energy is spent in making it a high probability that the offspring lives to child bearing age.
The theory behind it is called r/K selection theory (I only described a vague phenomenon, not any reason or mechanism behind it). The r and K come form a simple equational relation those as probabilities to the number of offspring.
The theory says that the evolutionary pressure that's behind all these correlations is stability of the environment. 'r-species', those with quantity offspring like mice, tend to exist in unstable, unpredictable environments with a lot of room in their niche (high 'carrying capacity'). 'K-species', quality offspring like elephants, usually occur in stable (low population change) environments or close to filling the niche.
That said, there is a loose, not perfect, analogy with product design. Consider a widget making company. The company can spend all its energy creating lots of different widgets of acceptable quality. Some may work out some may not, but having a lot of then increases the chances that at least one will work out in the end.
Another company with the same resources may spend them all on making very few widgets but very refined specially made ones. Each of these few widgets are very likely to become successful because of the resources put into them
So, just like with animal reproduction frequency, it's a tradeoff. For constant resources, low probability survival of individuals can be offset by many individuals, and high probability of survival requiring lots of resources offset by having very few individuals.
For business, the corresponding explanation would be that in an unstable unknown business environment, having lots of products with slightly different features, can increase the chance of viability (eg web game companies have many games on offer but only one or two become famous). In a very stale business environment, with few companies selling few alternatives, a lot of company resources should be spent on just a few very large well-known products.
So this is just theory, and an analogy of a theory, and one can imagine many examples for which the explanation works, for which it practically works, and for what it just makes no sense.
'Agile' and 'lean' and 'fail quickly' are recent manufacturing trends. They are usually in contrast to the software development 'waterfall' planning method. Agile and waterfall don't necessarily apply well to the same kinds of software. Waterfall usually works best for a large scale well-understood design situation, and agile for a small project where all issues are not well-understood before hand and quick changes need to be made based on changing circumstances.
The analogy from biology to business to software development is not perfect but there are enough similarities to be recognizable.
One more analogy: scientific publishing. Historically (Europe), publishing of scientific knowledge started off as monographs (eg Aristotle, or at least that's all that has survived) and during the renaissance included personal correspondence which morphed into privately bound collections of papers and now (early 21st c) the library-industrial complex of journals. Textbooks and monographs are still considered the pinnacle, but are infinitesimally small by weight of paper, or more modernly, number of bytes.
Also, research has turned, during and after WWII, a government supported endeavor (where before only rich people had the means to do it).
There is so much research going on and papers being produced and science being fractured into narrower and narrower domains, that many papers are published (after being peer reviewed) and never read by anyone else. I'm not saying this is a bad thing. It sounds bad because that effort seems wasted. I'm just pointing out the analogy with quantity vs quality; the recent trend is towards quantity. Actually I don't think quality has necessarily bee traded off, just that the resources has exploded, allowing lots of failures to exist alongside really great advances that would never have come without the resources.
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