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Why Engineers (Usually) Aren’t To Blame For Missed Product Deadlines
Picture this: Your company is about to miss a second product deadline that you’ve committed to publicly. You’ve told the press that you are launching Feature X tomorrow and QA knows it’s not ready. What do you do if you are the CEO? Marketing Manager? VP of Engineering? Whose fault is this and how can you course correct?
Many people’s first response is to blame the Engineers. After all, they didn’t deliver on time. It must be their fault. But this is usually an oversimplification of the product development process. There are best practices for managing a product crisis, and almost none of them involve screaming at engineering.
Ideally you never want to be put in this situation. But examining this hypothetical example of missed public deadlines can be instructive for executives and professionals in a variety of fields.
The first question to ask when staring down the barrel of a (second) public shaming is, “How did we get here?” There are many ways this scenario could have happened.
This kind of problem usually occurs when a company builds something new. Maybe it is a first-run product or a new set of features. Maybe there is a new third party API. Whatever the product or feature is, it typically contains a lot of unknown variables and hidden horrors that push out expected deadlines.
There are also institutional issues that contribute to missed product milestones. Problems can occur when business or financial motives arbitrarily set product deadlines without getting sign off from the “boots on the ground” in engineering.
A good rule of thumb for setting product development deadlines is to have the engineering team 90% confident that they can meet proposed milestones. Not the head of engineering (at least not without the confidence of all his team leads). Not the CEO. Managers can’t will something into existence if it requires code, no matter how persuasive they are. Make sure that all the people who own the product have committed to the date and encourage them to send honest feedback up the food chain.
Of course, the best possible scenario is never missing a public deadline in the first place. Here, then, are our guiding principles for managing missed public deadlines.
1. If you miss a publicly announced deadline, don’t set a second deadline publicly.
2. If there are variables in the project that are out of your control (such as third parties) don’t set a new deadline publicly.
3. Only announce a ship date after the product is ready to ship and all the bugs are worked out.
4. If marketing (or any other department, for that matter) changes product features, engineering needs to adjust the ship date. If this date is publicly available, you must communicate the changes to the public.
5. If you work in Marketing/ Communications/ PR/ Social Media, be realistic. Don’t be hopeful, optimistic, pessimistic, angry or ashamed. Be real. No one cares how you feel about your missed deadline. Stick to the facts.
6. Don’t blame others for your own missed milestone– it’s petty.
7. Clearly explain why the deadline was missed. Open the kimono and tell what happened (in diplomatic terms), what your initial expectations were and why you were wrong.
8. The moment an organization knows a product will be late it must begin the process of communicating that information to the press and public. The sooner the better.
An analogy here is to think of going on a hot date. If you have a date with an attractive person at 8:00 pm, and you know that you are running late, when would be a good time to tell that person that you won’t make it on time? Should you tell them as soon as you know, or at 7:59 pm? It all depends if you want another date.
9. CEOs should investigate the process and find out where it broke down. In addition to issuing personal apologies the CEO should be prepared to fire inept senior managers.
In general, keep your product road map a secret. Ask yourself why you are announcing something before it is ready? It can’t be to drive sales, because the product is not on sale. Is it for pre-orders? There is almost no upside to releasing dates to the press and public. There are, however, many downsides.
Apple does this incredibly well. If Apple told the media that iPad 2 would ship on XX day with YY features, that would only cut into the original iPad’s sales. So they never announce a product until they know that it is ready to ship. To conclude, there are many things executives can do when a public deadline is missed, but the most important one is to not give a revised deadline that people will not have faith in.
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