Key to Product Success - Timeliness

When people think of success factors of a product, they often consider:

• Problem it solves
• Completeness of the product
• Product quality

However, a very important aspect of product success that is often missed - especially in the technology companies - is timeliness. One aspect of the timeliness is whether the market is ready to accept the product (time-to-market) and other is delivering the product at promised timeline.

As the title suggests this post focuses on the delivery timelines.

Why it is important to deliver on promised time?

Since I am doing release management or product management I often get this question from Engg team members. It comes in different forms: 

• Will sky fall if we delay the delivery - We are not services company where client will shout? 
• We have so many things to deal with - delay can happen - what's a big deal?
• What we gave earlier were only estimates - reality has hit afterwards and that's very different from what we thought. What should we do?

Many times the question come because the team members really don't know the impact of missing the date.

 My answer has been that there are two type of impacts happen - functional and emotional. Functional impacts can be managed but managing emotional impacts is very difficult.

Let's first talk about functional items. Based on the dates given by Engg team, release date is published by product or program team. 

Marketing team builds their entire plan based on this release date.
For example, the analyst relationship (AR) team appraises the industry analysts (multiple of them), ask them to include the new items into the articles analysts are writing. AR Team and the analysts agree on a date for publishing these articles so that the company can get maximum benefit out of the activity. Mostly, all these articles are written and reviewed in advance and scheduled to be automatically published at the agreed time.

Similarly, Press Release (PR) about the product is also distributed in advance and is scheduled to automatically published at agreed time. Website updates, Email campaigns, Social Media Marketing (SMM) campaigns etc. are also created and scheduled. Many times, the material to be shown in a tradeshow booth is also created to take the new release into the market.

Sales enablement team provide information about upcoming release to the field teams i.e. Pre-Sales and Post-Sales (Customer Success) Engineers. Field teams start socializing about the new features with the customers/partners in private conversations under NDA. Sometimes, customers or prospects wait for these new features.

If delivery happens on time all the above machinery aligns very well. You get a lot of good business. Typically, as part of business planning it is a good idea to keep little margin (buffer) for the unforeseen slips. So until the delay in product delivery is within that margin, all goes good.

If product delivery gets delayed beyond a limit, entire line up crashes. It not just impacts the people inside the company but also outside the company. Some of the dates in the line up described above can be changed easily (e.g. email campaign etc.), some can be changed with difficulty (e.g. PR lineup etc.) and some can't be changed (e.g. trade show etc.) at all. The delay may causes the monitory loss also - for example if you have to re-do the booth layout and content.

If the release happens on time, everyone feels confident and emotional quotient goes high. However, in case of delay emotional problems also start. There are lot of questions start floating around related to the cause of the delay and finger pointing starts with a phrase "I am not pointing fingers but just stating the facts"

Marketing team needs to connect to all the AR/PR people and convince them to delay the messaging - some people agree to delay and some just omit your name. Moreover, there is a loss of face - next time when marketing team connects to the same AR/PR people, they become skeptical or refuse to help.

Field teams also loose trust of prospect/customer/partner because of the delay - I have seen partners laughing when sales person try promising an upcoming feature.

In turn, internal teams stop trusting Engg team and all the Go-to-Market (GTM) effort is planned only after the feature is in the hand of SEs. As a result Engg and GTM teams are never in sync and the gap widens. With the wrong time-to-market ultimately the product and the company suffers.

In my next post, I will talk about how a company can maintain the timeliness of the product delivery. Engg work estimation becomes the key here.