engineering
Importance:

Factor of Safety

Also known as: safety factor, design margin, margin of safety

How much stronger you build something than it strictly needs to be, to absorb the uncertainty you can't fully model.

Factor of Safety

A factor of safety is the deliberate margin between what a structure can take and what you expect it to face. You never load a beam to exactly its limit, because your model is an approximation and reality has a longer tail than your spreadsheet.

I budget product decisions the same way. Where the cost of being wrong is high and the data is thin, I build in margin; where it’s cheap to be wrong, I run closer to the edge and learn fast. Sizing the margin honestly is the whole skill.