How do you prioritize and manage the trade-offs between features, quality, and time to market?

In my humble opinion, time to market is not as critical as understanding your market needs and requirements. Such as durability, reliability and most important, target price. For my company, most "new" products out there are just a re-version of an old product. We are not reinventing the wheel. So, knowing your customers' needs and budget are more critical.

In my experience attaining top quality costs a lot of time, which results that you are (too) late to market. So my tip is for your design think R&D process: “to fake it before you make it” among customers. Get their feedback on what quality means for them and which features are ‘need to have’. The earlier you connect customers to your innovation project the sooner you know you are on the right track.

I use a modified RICE score that entails the following: I -> Impact: $ saved or $ revenue. The time horizon will vary depending on the duration it took to reach positive cash flow. I.e. it is ok to look at revenue over the next 1-10 years depending on the investment. Ci -> Confidence: level of the Impact E -> Effort: Hours to complete the task Ce -> Confidence: level of the effort The goal is to use this across all teams and within your own department so that you can evaluate like for like. While there will always be ways to game the system, this method has worked for me.

Trade-offs are the enemy. They are compromises and they represent giving up on having it all! There are specific approaches which eliminate trade-offs, but people think it is impossible, so they are rarely used. Also, ask yourself, how satisfying is it for you to develop a compromise solution?

?????????????????? ??A Minimally Viable Product (MVP) is a prototype version of a product that fulfills each and every project requirement; and it is primarily used to solicit user feedback. ??MVP’s are not necessarily met in an efficient or effective way; the code often has long run times, has data leaks, or needs UX/UI improvements. ??Having an MVP allows you to have a good-enough prototype to give to people to solicit feedback, so it must be nearly ??% feature-ready. Just not necessarily ready for the big time yet. ??Concentrate engineering effort on the features where feedback is needed when making project priority decisions. This helps concentrate effort where it is needed most. #engineering #projectmanagement #softwaredevelopment

When designing a new product, I always like to think of the "Safety first" principle. When going over quality and time balance, the best items to address first are those that can cause harm to either customers or employees. Aside from the obvious risk of harm, it is also an expensive potential quality concern and needs to be at the top of the list. After that, look at the time to market, and see if the level of quality needed is realistic. While being on the market first with a new product is important, you also don't want to deliver a subpar product.