Product Development Pitfalls: Timelines

When dealing with projects and products, timelines can be a huge debate that causes more stress than action.

In most if not all situations, timelines cause a lot of stress to both the developer and the person ordering the timelines. Tesla is the best example of impossible timelines that might cause a lot of headaches.

As a technical person, how can you manage expectations to not only perceive you’re quick as heck, but also have the courage to say that “this will take a while”.

All timelines are controlled by external factors and internal factors. External factors are factors you can’t control when building something, internal factors are those you can.

For me, external factors are just variables that can be refined, while internal factors act as strategies to improve those variables. By utilizing your internal factors, you can accelerate the external factors.

Here are my tips and tricks to manage and perhaps accelerate timelines.

External Factors

Almost everyone I’ve met who had to put in a construction process has had their timeline doubled. It’s a pain because there is so much to be done when constructing a building.

Yet the biggest headache are factors you really can’t control. The government, contractors, and everyone under the moon will delay the timeline because so many hands are touching the product.

The same can be said for product development. The more people you have on the product, the more delays can potentially happen.

This not only includes people, but ingredients as well, because every ingredient is linked to an account manager, who is in term, linked to a bunch of other people you have no idea about.

Here is a list of external factors that are out of your control when you develop a product:

• Copackers
• Ingredient Suppliers
• Transportation and logistics
• Food Safety Lab Tests
• Stage Gate Approval (hard to get a bunch of C-suites in a room)
• Marketing direction
• Budget
• Sales cycles and who you’re selling to

Now to get rid of these external factors, you can convert these processes in-house, but that is a very dangerous thing to do as the expertise that goes along with these external factors, whether legitimate or not, is hard to replicate.

Internal Factors

What could you be doing to speed up the timelines? Can one person really cut a timeline in half? The answer is yes, you can. At Isagenix, I employed several techniques to make people care about the products I made, which is an important tactic when it comes to accelerating timelines. Each of the strategies below handle certain external factors.

Relationship Building

The best way you can ever speed up external factors is to create an environment where the external factor gatekeepers want you to succeed. When creating the first product for Better Meat Co, my biggest advantage was that I had people who wanted me to succeed. What would take years to figure out a product was cut to 4 months due to not only the network I had but also how well I knew the people I interacted with. This took years of either touching base, eating dinner, or buying product from them. This was highly effective when it came to dealing with ingredient suppliers or copackers.

Never burn bridges in the food industry because you never know who will be the next sales rep at your favorite flavor house.

However, I do believe karma is very advantageous in this situation. Even if I did burn bridges, because I guess I’m decently well-known in the food industry due to the podcast, there are always other options.

Overall, relationship building is a lot of work, but when it comes to people caring about what you do, it matters when it comes to accelerating timelines.

So go to that networking event 2 hours away.

Multiple Paths

A great strategy I’ve used is to challenge people to go through multiple paths. For example, if we wanted two coffee products but want different ways of tackling it, would it be better to just pool all your resources into one or do both until one survives?

I believe that if do both, then you’ll get much better results.

This is because focusing all your resources on one path has diminishing returns. Because the external factors will slow your progress, it is much better to try out multiple paths to see which product will make more sense to do.

We are currently trying this method with creating more products at the Better Meat Co. It takes a month to get a price quote currently due to the external factors we can’t control, so we can still look for alternatives within that month. Even then, creating multiple paths also gives the team a concrete deadline to gather enough information to make a decision. Once the price quote is given, we would have enough time to make an informed decision on both paths.

In House Viral Product

Giving away your product to everyone internally causes buzz, which can cause key stakeholders like C-suites to actually take notice of what’s happening. At Isagenix, whenever we had a pilot run of bars, we gave them away and the people who loved them, kept on asking for more.

No matter if people hate you, when they hear about a product circling around that everyone loves, they would be a fool to not take notice.

As long as you have your basis covered with supply chain and cost, your delicious product will be talked about in the next stage gate meeting. When everyone is stuck trying to find what product they need to launch, you’ll be ready with your viral product.

Communicating Timeline Issues

There will be times where you have to communicate timeline issues without looking like an idiot. This is a hard skill, but vital for career growth.

In all aspects of your technical career, your job is to leverage your expertise with your boss’ expectation.

Remember that your boss is not the technical expert. She has no idea how much work it takes to create a good product, so you have to really show (not tell) that you are the expert.

But there are degrees where your boss will disagree with you, because the point of your boss is to deliver stellar results to his boss. In most cases, you need to pick your battles, but what needs to be built is a sense of trust.

With trust, your boss can believe you when you say that this will take 2 weeks instead of two days.

But how can you build trust?

The easiest way to have more big wins than small losses.

Big wins include: making the company a lot of money, shortening certain timelines by half or more, building systems independently, making your boss look good.

Small losses include: complaining, being tardy, spending money on expensive parking, gossip, late timelines, etc

When you have enough big wins, the small stuff is eradicated, because now the reputation that you have is more about being reliable, or proactive, and that is probably the best way you can justify extending your timelines.

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