Fast Time To Market
In the early 1990s, lateralworks conducted an extensive multi-company study involving over 500 people who worked on fast-to-market projects in Silicon Valley. Since then, they have worked with hundreds of teams to accelerate the delivery of new technology products to market. The research continues today to keep the best practices current.
This podcast series will share many of the practices that teams use to deliver the right product to the market at the right time.
Fast Time To Market
Scheduling Invention using Learning Cycles
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In this episode of the FTTM podcast, the hosts tackle the anxiety-inducing challenge of “Scheduling Invention,” how to build a real timeline when you’re trying to create something that’s never existed before, and argue that the only way to go fast is to plan to fail in a disciplined way, because accelerating controlled failure accelerates learning. They contrast “slow teams” that chase a perfect Big Bang plan (and end up delivering a perfectly solved problem the market no longer has) with “fast teams” that run repeated do it / try it / fix it learning cycles, replacing product milestones with learning milestones (e.g., “answer why component X fails” instead of “prototype complete”). The episode lays out practical tools like Learning Cycle Planning (estimating effort by number of cycles based on problem difficulty), isolating the true invention “magic” from execution (the “90/10” idea), surfacing the uncomfortable but essential gap between what the math says and what the market wants, and refreshing the plan weekly using a “confidence trend” metric so projects don’t stay green until they’re suddenly on fire. The punchline: a schedule that admits you’re late today is actually a win, because it gives you time to make honest trade-offs—while the schedule that pretends you’re on time is the one that quietly kills the project.
