How Product Teams Should Set Deadlines

A few months back, I wrote a post entitled “The Why, What, and How of the Modern Product Team.” It was fairly well received, but one of my readers suggested that I answer the “When.” This is a tricky topic, because I don’t think there is any one correct answer.

There are really two different ways you can handle deadlines. The first is to go top down, and begin by choosing the deadline. Basically, you start by deciding when the product or feature will ship, and everything is subservient to that fixed point in time. This can happen when the release date is set by a business requirement such as a conference or a customer commitment.

How to approach a fixed deadline

There are two different ways you can handle a fixed deadline; the first is to push people to work as hard as is required to meet the schedule. And some managers really believe that teams can stretch to meet pretty much any deadline. While this strikes me as a good way to burn people out, there is probably some truth in saying that people will rise to the occasion. Setting a due date is a good way to focus people on actually completing a project.

The second way to work with a fixed deadline is to adjust scope until you have something that is shippable within the specified time frame. Once you know the deadline, you can work backwards and figure out how much you will have time to complete. This can be a good practice, as it forces you to decide what features are really important, and to put a stake in the ground by building only the minimal feature set.

And this isn’t just a one-time thing. Teams should regularly assess their current and future work, and then they should themselves whether they can complete this work by the deadline. If the answer to that is “no” or even “maybe,” they should figure out what can be removed from scope to change that answer to a “yes.” In some cases they may choose to move the deadline, but we will get to that in a second.

The truth is that these two methods aren’t mutually exclusive. You can consider how much will fit and also encourage people to work hard to fit that. Pretty much every non-trivial project I have worked on has had its schedule slip at some point in the process. There will be times where your team bite off…