Project Management: Time to Market, People & Teamwork

Starting early, not driving recklessly fast

People who have worked with me are familiar with my trait of challenging the team to bring products and solutions to market as soon as possible. I’m a strong proponent for quickness to market and love to deliver sooner than the initially projected timeline. In this article, however, I present a different viewpoint for balance.

In product development, the question often comes up: How can we be quicker and faster to market with our products? We should ask instead: How can we be earlier to market with our products than our competitors? We should also ask: Is it more important to be early, or to deliver good quality and innovation?

For the medium and long term good of your organization and in the best interest of your customers, it is more important to deliver a high quality and innovative product than to deliver it quicker.

In most cases, successful companies are not the ones who are fast or early to deliver products, but those that deliver better products.

Take Google for example. They were a couple of years late to the Web search engine market and were reinventing a product that had already been established by others. Many thought the search engine market was already saturated. Remember some of the early ones like Infoseek, Lycos? Where are they now? Consider Microsoft and Apple: most of their products are not early, but they often succeed. The iPod came years after the early portable digital audio players. MySpace.com came up to dominate online social networking a couple of years after Friendster, Tribe and Orkut were already established.

Even when analyzing products whose success was due their being early to market, we find that early does not imply fast. These projects often started early and were executed at a comfortable, smooth pace.

As the saying goes, when you ask for quick and dirty, you get both. The benefits of speed to market are for the short term. In some cases, it does make sense to go for quick, short-term solutions. In all cases, however, one must give serious thought to whether that’s the correct path to choose considering the medium and long term goals.

People & Teamwork

In projects, working fast is often a recipe for failure, especially after starting late. The overwhelming majority of projects are not like 100 meter races, where speed results in victory. They are like football games, where factors like teamwork have much greater influence on winning.

The greatest factor affecting the success of projects is not speed, not technology, not even process or planning. It is people. Invest your time, energy and resources on your people and they will make your projects succeed more than anything else.

Whether you are a leader, manager or information worker, I recommend learning more about the people factor and practicing better people related activities at work. Here is a quote I like from a book: “People under time pressure don’t work better; they just work faster. In order to work faster, they may have to sacrifice the quality of the product and their own job satisfaction.” — Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd Edition, Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister

Keep in mind this order of descending significance of factors in projects’ success:

1. People & teamwork
2. Priorities
3. Planning
4. Process & operations
5. Products & technologies
6. Pace & acceleration