On unrealistic timelines, project scope, and the cost of staying silent when a plan doesn’t hold up. A COO’s account of stakeholder management and decision-making under pressure, walking into a product release meeting three months before a client deadline, with nothing built.
Story shared by Andrew Visser, Fractional COO, enabling founders and CEOs to spend less time managing and more time growing.
Three months to define, build, test and deploy a moderately complex system.
That sales had already promised to clients.
In a regulated industry.
I walked into that product release planning meeting expecting a plan.
What I found was confidence without foundation.
Nice screen mock-ups. Good UX flows.
No CTO. No development plan. No infrastructure plan. No API documentation. A Head of Development freshly promoted into a role he’d never done before — and not even in the room.
Nobody had done anything close to this before.
But nobody had said that out loud yet.
Sometimes leadership is about hard truths.
Telling people they’re out of their depth.
That the timeline isn’t a stretch goal, it’s a fiction.
That what’s been promised can’t be delivered.
So we went to the whiteboard.
Found the one person who’d worked with the external system before.
Mapped the messaging.
Stripped everything down to the absolute minimum.
Built the most minimal MVP possible.
Then I told the CEO, the founder, and the investor the truth:
Even with all of this, three months was very unlikely.
The room didn’t love it.
But it needed to be said.
The most expensive meeting isn’t the long one.
It’s the one where the right person stays quiet.
Sometimes success isn’t hitting the deadline.
It’s finding what others overlooked and creating a timeline that’s actually real.
About this story
Shared by Andrew Visser, Fractional COO, enabling founders and CEOs to spend less time managing and more time growing. Curated by Ghita Ramdhiansing, founder of See Suite and developer of Interaction Intelligence.