The point of the schedule isn't to be right
Artifact's Roadmap Builder showing critical milestones, financial projections, and linked dependencies
This wrong "green lights schedule" structure, plus constant mitigation, at scale, is the fastest and most anti-fragile way to deliver a complex integrated system.
Traditional engineers get personal satisfaction from delivering uncontextualized scope before an arbitrary deadline. As a result, unchallenged and pocket-margined "realistic schedules" have become industry-norm. Unfortunately, when these individually-optimized schedules are stacked 1) product development is net slower because insufficient parallel-pathing and 2) interdisciplinary failures are expensive, if not fully unresolvable, because of staggered deliveries without early integrated milestones.
On the contrary, if you start with a top-down product-driven schedule, and back out the individual contributors' timelines – while it forces unorthodox order of operations – you deliver a working system faster. And when early integration milestones inevitably have failures; the early, low-inertia system can respond quickly (opposed to billion-dollar rollbacks and redesigns – think F35, 787, JWST).
Of course, a "wrong but useful" schedule is a great way to piss off your team, so, there are prerequisites:
System owners are contextualized on technical, finance, and business requirements; they hold all subsystem owners accountable; and they have the authority to make strategy, scope, and schedule trades
Managers have relationships to determine and assign the right (sometimes non-obvious) person to a problem to pull in overall schedule (by putting muscle behind critical path items)
Organization incentivizes (rather than retaliates against) risk-taking, failures, and escalations. Without trust and a fair heuristic to make decisions/trades, this system breaks
Overhead to schedule/pivot is lightweight – granularity is only be required when it matters (e.g. a 20-day "design the PCB" generic block is fine if it passes a vibe-check and is not critical path)
When done right, small teams can deliver insane scope in impressive timelines – and by design, alongside a totally wrong schedule.
Antony Samuel
Co-Founder / CEO, Artifact
Antony co-founded Artifact's to modernize electrical system design. Previously, he built avionics at Boom Supersonic and led avionics at Hermeus.
