A childhood friend of mine grew up to be Chief Technology Officer at a large software company. He was always the smartest kid in the room. 800 on his math SATs. You know the type.

Despite the big brain, he was and is a humble person. So whenever he said something that struck me as controversial, I paid close attention because I knew he wasn’t doing it to draw attention to himself. He was fond of saying that commercial research and development organizations can control only three things:

• Features — what does it do?
• Dates — when is it available?
• Quality — how bullet-proof is it?

And of these three, Dates are the most important. Why? Because a good product or service in the market that’s generating some revenue and feedback is always better than “perfection” that never sees the light of day.

You can probably guess his favorite corollary to this Truth. When an R&D team is fighting the calendar and in grave danger of missing a delivery date, the answer is to simply deliver early. Take what you got and get it to market.

As you can see, speed-to-market was his primary focus. What’s yours?

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