Do More Faster India, 2nd Edition

Chapter 44Be Specific

Brad Feld

Brad is a partner at Foundry Group and one of the cofounders of Techstars.

A company I have a small investment in has been struggling to get the most recent version of their software shipped. A few weeks ago, I ran into the CEO, who grabbed me and said, “We are almost ready to go live.” I looked at him and said, “When is the release?” His answer was “Friday.”

I gave him a Bronx cheer and said, “When on Friday?” He looked at me like I was an alien. I clarified—”Do you mean 12:01 a.m. on Friday, 4:59 p.m. on Friday, or 11:59 p.m. on Friday?” I then clarified some more: “And I mean in Mountain Time.” We agreed that 11:59 p.m. on Friday was a good time (which they missed, but they got it out a few days later).

This CEO and his company suffered from one of the major mistakes in software development: not sticking to an exact schedule for product releases. Making that mistake frustrates customers and tarnishes your brand.

At my first company (Feld Technologies), our client base got to the point where we were often doing multiple releases of different software on a weekly basis. We were a custom software company but used a very traditional software engineering approach for our projects. For a long time, we used dates to mark releases (for example, “Friday”). After way too many 11:59 p.m. releases when our clients were definitely not sticking around the office to wait for us and missed FedEx deadlines (this was back when you had to FedEx the disks to ...