The Constraint I Used to Resist Is Now My Favorite Tool

Imagine having unlimited time, resources, and runway. Sounds like a dream, right? Yet paradoxically, this is my worst nightmare. The naive view of constraints is that they hold you back and you’d be better off without them.

As I’ve progressed in my career, I’ve come to appreciate constraints as tools for honing ideas and products. They eliminate waste and promote focus and discipline.

Time stands as the ultimate constraint—a merciless, non-renewable resource. I love it because it’s the great equalizer. We all get 24 hours today with no guarantees of another 24 tomorrow. This is a simple fact we all know, but we don’t always let it influence our behavior.

We delay. We perfect. We refine. And in doing so, we fail to deliver.

Parkinson’s law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Anyone on a product team knows this. If you give a team three months for a feature, it will take three months. If you give them six, surprise! It takes six.

You may know Hofstadter’s Law: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”

What do you do? How do you ensure enough time to get things done without falling hopelessly behind?

One popular approach that I don’t recommend is to push your team harder. Working extra hours yields immediate results. But just like hours in the day, you run out of nights and weekends for the team to sacrifice. Unless you’re working on AGI, a rocket to Mars, or the cure for cancer, there are limits on how much and how long you can ask this of a team.

Rules of thumb

For new healthcare or life science SaaS products with fresh teams, aim for a maximum of 12 months from having one person working on it to it being in a customer’s hands. You need product/market fit feedback, and a year is long to wait for proof points. Every day without customer feedback risks building the wrong thing. Nine months is better. Six is ideal. Twelve is the limit.

For existing products, new features should be delivered in six weeks. That’s long enough for meaningful work, but short enough to focus on delivering only what’s essential. Check out Shape Up by 37Signals for implementation details.

Bugs affecting customers are intolerable and get fixed ASAP. There’s no tolerance for even superficial defects in this industry.

The tyranny of time forces prioritization. It demands you answer: “What’s the one thing we must get right?”

When the clock is ticking, you discover what matters.