Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?
One of our best programmers just came into my office. He’s working on a new price list that 
we’re putting into place, and he’s on a tight deadline. I need to be able to announce the new rates in three weeks, at the first public demonstration of the application FogBugz 7.0.
Implementing the new prices on our website is going to take too long, he told me. We aren’t going to have it ready in time for my announcement.
“What? You’ve got three weeks! Three weeks to change some prices? I could change those prices by the time I go home today,” I lied.
Changing the prices for new customers is easy, he explained. The hard part is building a slick new area on our website where existing customers can go to convert to the new pricing.
“What if we don’t have a slick website?” I asked.
“Anybody who wanted to convert would have to call in, and we’d have to do it manually,” he said.
“Could you get that part done on time? With the manual conversion?”
He said he could. Which means we’re going to do a half-baked job of implementing these new prices. We have to, this time, because we’re committed to a date.
Normally, we don’t do things this way at Fog Creek. Speed to market usually involves a direct tradeoff with quality. If you need high-quality code, it takes time, and we’ve always taken the time to do things right. No deadlines here! Among other things, taking the time to do things right has probably slowed us down. A lot. Read full story:
