Time-to-market is always the first casualty of war: Never lose your Queen.

Key points:

• We often consider projects balanced between the triple constraints of time, budget and quality.
• This assumes they’re equal.
• In bringing a new digital product to market, they’re not.
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We’ve long understood what is known as the Project Management Triangle or Triple Constraints: the relationships between the three primary constraints in project and digital product development:

• Time: time to market (how quickly you can get there, a deadline to meet, or the time it takes).
• Budget: the financial resources allocated or allocatable.
• Quality: the standard of “excellence” expected or accepted in getting there.
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These three constraints are interdependent, and if you change one, it should affect the others.

Conclusion: In (commercial) product development, time to market is always the first casualty of war. However, thinking of time as equal to budget and quality is wrong. The consequences of losing time or time-to-market exponentially impact the other two constraints and introduce many new risks that should be unacceptable in product development.

Time-to-market is your Queen in chess. Sure, if you lose the King, and the game is over. However, the Queen’s power is versatility and range.

And lose the Queen, and the King is next.
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I speak from an unfortunate amount of experience.

For a long time, I’ve tried to articulate the inherent faults in the typical digital agency model and the delivery of commercial digital products (websites, etc.).

They are too fundamental for this article, though let’s agree that building a digital product - a website, an app, whatever it is - with a (typical, project-based) digital agency is rarely a great experience.

Ironically, when we look at the triple constraints when it comes to the typical digital agency approach, you typically lose them all: things take longer (time), things cost more, with little gratification to show for it (budget), and the output is much poorer than you anticipated, but through gritted will now accept to get the shit-show on the road (quality).

But does one drive the others?

What fallen chess piece fundamentally drives them all to fall?

It’s time. It is unquestionably time to market.

Nothing else comes close to quite predictably starting a grass fire that will take out every tenant of your digital project.

I speak from an unfortunate amount of experience.
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Why is time-to-market always the first casualty of war?

Good-god.

Let me count just a few of the ways.

Your typical digital agency is a shit show.

The fundamental process underlining how you engage them is broken.

Your digital agency has taken on your ‘project’ with the inherent constraints projects introduce when you need an agile and flexible process.

You/they have grossly underestimated what is needed, cannot compromise, or both. (A failure of the inherent process.)

Your typical digital agency is a shit show.

But typically, because you’ll accept it, unaware of the staggering risks you’re inheriting through a decision you probably don’t have much power over.

Time-to-market is the easiest thing to throw over the wall.

It’s a variable that unlocks valuable time.

It’s time to unscrew the underestimation in your project.

It’s time to catch up on other more pressing projects on the agency side.

You just lost your Queen.
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Let’s talk about budgets.

There are so many things to say here in so little time.

Digital agencies are obsessed with budgets and don’t understand how they work in corporate land.

I’ve worked in both.

Winning a new client is a significant cash flow and revenue deal for a typical digital agency. They count that cash upfront.

Asking for more budget is challenging. And it is usually done under a style of duress.

And not for the right reasons.

And never to buttress you losing your Queen.

Because time-to-market is the least critical constraint for a typical digital agency.

(Ironically, it is and should be, though it is easiest to throw time over the wall: most typical digital agencies just haven’t worked out why their problems as an agency are pronouncing due to delayed projects.)

What typical digital agencies also don’t understand is that, for slightly different reasons, clients have time-to-market as an imperative.

Mainly so you don’t have to change your name, resign, or move interstate.

Budgets can and should be flexible. Especially to push back on lost time-to-market.

It’s a fact of life that things always cost more. How you eventually find out about this in agency land is usually heart-destroying because the agency is coy, and you need to know if/why more budget is required.

Money/budget is the most accessible variable.

Agencies, however, wait until the house is on fire before they ask for more money.

As the client, you have the budget. Especially if you know it will arrest time-to-market.

But the house is now on fire.
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Let’s talk about quality.

I don’t want to get into a subjective debate about quality. Shit is shit, and you’ve engaged a digital agency for creative, quality output. You should rightly expect that.

But it is all subjective.

And every round of polish is just that.

Your polishing decisions aren’t grounded in data. And goddam, you’re offline.

What is more important?

Subjectively better stuff offline or being online?

I’d take a landing page over a fully-fledged website any day.

Forego the quality front as much as you can. You can always get it back later on.
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Why time-to-market is your Queen.

I had a sandwich today with a colleague from a few years back - a great Product Manager.

His last gig was with a pretty established and successful product business: a global email and communications platform.

His primary gripe. Time-to-market and the consequences that came from that.

It killed him. And it killed opportunity - more than anything.

So, in discussing why time-to-market is your Queen, let’s stop going after digital agencies and take a broader look at why time is critical to product and product success.

And in doing this, I am going to walk back the grassfire.
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Lost focus and distraction

You’re months and months from where you expected to be.

Your focus has changed. How could it not?

This product you’ve been trying to get to market is no longer so exciting.

It’s an anvil around your leg and nobody isn’t noticing.

And don't think you aren’t the only one that has lost focus.
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And delay begets more delay.

You’re used to this. Risk adversity, more delays to get things done, it all compounds.

It weighs things down like quality and budget never would have.

A quagmire.

Delay creates more delay.

Six months become nine if you’re lucky.
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Quality is lost in frustration.

You give in. You’ll take what you can get. Can we please compromise and get this product to market?

It can’t surely take this long. Where has everyone gone?

However, nobody knows where to compromise. Focus is lost, as are priorities.

Your MVP is no longer minimal.

Budgets are up and return on investment is hard to identify.

Here is the funny one (I guess).

You’re now paying more. For things you thought you had paid for.

But what you are paying is the price of delay.

A failure to keep momentum.

Nobody knows what you are paying for.
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Time to market and lost opportunity.

And here is the clincher. Why was losing your versatile, long-reaching Queen the most significant loss?

You’re offline when the whole bloody point of the exercise was to be online.

To capture an opportunity. To learn, validate and improve.

Screw budgets, screw quality. You’re offline, so you have nothing to show.

What wouldn’t you pay to be online with something, anything?

You’d compromise quality to be online at this point.

Of course.

But you lost your Queen too early if you should have given it up at all.
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Some home truths

My mother was fond of the idea of home truths.

Uncomfortable though unusually undeniable truths designed to shock us and hopefully make us learn.

If you lose time-to-market, you’ve set a train in motion.

You can catch it, though the further away it gets, the worse it gets.

You can pull other levers - quality and budget - if you can do it in time.

Which in the Product or client function can be challenging, though it is critically essential.

Time-to-market rules them all. It is your Queen. Never lose it.

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