Your Release To Market Was Delayed…
But it was already late, before anyone wrote a single line of code.
Think about this and see if it sounds familiar. The team commits to deliver in six months. The work starts and suddenly six months turns to eight months and then eight months turns to twelve.
The whole scenario leading up to that probably feels very familiar. An idea was crafted for a significant set of changes to support a specific product line. The requirements were incomplete, the scope wasn’t entirely vetted and, the dependencies weren’t clearly articulated. But no one knew it at the time because the right people weren’t in the room to ask the right questions. Folks who had been through a delivery cycle before would have flagged those misses immediately. But, because they didn’t know what they didn’t know, a date was put on a slide to deliver something, on what turned out to be an unrealistic timeline.
And we all know what happens when the date gets written on a slide – it gets shared with stakeholders, and leadership, and maybe even customers, and it ALWAYS becomes gospel.
The problem is, those dates were never committed to by the people who have to do the work and deliver the results. The business analysts didn’t review the requirements, the developers didn’t have the opportunity to question and understand the logic and the quality assurance team didn’t have time to identify potential touchpoints across systems and where impacts might be seen or felt.
So that my friends, is the moment the release got delayed. Not when the first deadline was missed. Not when testing blew up. Not when the scope had to be cut. Right there, in that meeting, when a date was committed without the people doing the work ever being asked if it was possible.
Now, when the delivery team finally gets their hands on the requirements, two things happen simultaneously – and both are predictable.
For the things they genuinely didn’t understand, they went back to the product team and asked questions and the requirements got reworked. This takes time and that causes the first set of delays.
For the things they think they understood – but really don’t – they make assumptions. They code against those assumptions without validating them because they don’t want to delay development any longer, so they keep pushing.
When the work hits testing, the assumptions collapse. The code doesn’t do what it needs to do and fails. Rework is inevitable. Some releases get descoped significantly. Others miss their dates entirely.
That instinct – to keep moving rather than stop and clarify — costs even more time, and at this point, money.
And so, a 6-month release timeline becomes 12 months.
Now – I want to be clear about something: the people on that team were not incompetent. They were not lazy. They were working hard under a timeline they had no part in setting, against requirements that were never complete, in a culture where asking too many questions felt like admitting you weren’t moving fast enough.
The failure wasn’t in the execution. The failure was baked in before execution ever started.
The Pattern Behind Every Release Delay
Release to market delays are ALMOST NEVER caused by the people doing the building. They are caused by what was never defined, never clarified, and never agreed upon before the building began.
Here is what that looks like in practice. These are the six things that were missing, and that are missing, in almost every delayed release I have ever seen:
1. What does the business need — specifically?
Not a general direction. Not a high-level goal. The specific functionality, the specific outcomes, the specific definition of what ‘done’ looks like. When this isn’t locked down before development begins, the team builds to their interpretation. And their interpretation is almost never exactly what the business had in mind.
2. What is impacted by this change?
Every new product, every new feature, every significant change touches something that already exists. Existing processes. Existing technology. Existing workflows. Existing customer expectations. When the full impact isn’t mapped before the work starts, it gets discovered mid-build – at the worst possible time and the highest possible cost.
3. What is explicitly OUT of scope?
This is the question most teams skip entirely. Everyone talks about what’s in scope. Almost nobody documents what isn’t. And then, mid-project, someone asks for something that wasn’t in the plan, and without a documented out-of-scope list, the answer becomes a negotiation instead of a boundary. Scope creep doesn’t happen all at once. It happens one undocumented addition at a time.
4. How will this be tested — and who will validate it?
Testing criteria need to be defined before development begins, not after. When you know what ‘passing’ looks like from the start, you build toward it. When you define it after the fact, you’re measuring against a moving target. And the question of who validates it – especially from a customer or end-user perspective – matters just as much as the technical test plan.
5. Does the team that has to build this agree with the timeline?
This is the question that was never asked in the story above. A timeline of deliverables that was never validated by the people doing the work is not a plan, it’s a wish list. The people closest to the complexity, the ones who will discover the gaps, hit the dependencies, and absorb the rework, need to be in the room when the date gets set. If they’re not, the date is fiction.
6. Does the team fully understand what is being asked?
Not ‘do they have the requirements document.’ Do they UNDERSTAND it? Can they explain back what they’re building and why? Do they know what questions to ask? The team that keeps moving because asking questions feels like slowing down, is the team that discovers their assumptions were wrong in testing and after months of work are already done.
The Questions to Sit With
Before your next release, before your next product launch, before your next significant change initiative, stop and ask these questions:
Was this timeline set with input from the people who have to deliver it — or was it committed before they were consulted?
Are the requirements complete enough that the delivery team can build without making assumptions?
Do we have a documented out-of-scope list that everyone has agreed to?
Do we know exactly how this will be tested and who will validate it before it goes live?
Has the team that is building this confirmed they understand what is being asked?
If the answer to any of those questions is no – or ‘I’m not sure’ – the release is already at risk. Not because of what happens in development but because of what was never defined before development started.
Where to Start
This is precisely what the Discover & Understand phase of the Touchstone Discovery Method is designed to prevent. To find out more, explore our methodology:
Before any initiative gets resourced, before any timeline gets committed, before any development begins, we map what is known, what is unknown, and what needs to be answered before the work can proceed with confidence. That includes requirements, impact assessment, scope definition, testing criteria, timeline validation, and team alignment.
The work that feels like it slows you down at the beginning is the work that keeps you from losing six months in the middle or on the end.
Want to talk through where your next initiative stands? Reach out
The release was already late, you just didn’t know it yet.
Disclaimer
AI tools supported the research and editing of this article. The claims are sourced and cited for accuracy. The ideas, experience, writing and perspective are my own.