Nobody is sure what’s going to happen by what point
Disproof
A common, mutually verified of what is being solved by when
Consequences
Some poor account manager might see an early testing build and tells a customer it's shipping ASAP and be left sweating as bug after bug gets found in QA
Marketing can jump the gun and announce a launch date well before something is ready for GA
You multiply the drama when the company is actually misaligned on how much of the solution is going to be out by when - product is proud for launching something simple, loveable and complete to only get screamed at for not shipping an enterprise grade solution on day one
Generally, market and customer trust gets destroyed and once a cohort is lost, it is lost
Causes
Usually starts from not having ‘done’ defined
This tends to be worst in B2B businesses with high amounts of nontechnical staff, who tend to assume building stuff is an atomic process that just completes the moment code gets checked in
As ever, silo’d teams with poor communication skills make it worse
Approaches
Educate everyone on the phases of product development for starters, including the notion of testing and iteration. Drill them on the differences between code completion, review, technical QA, acceptance testing, A/B, controlled availability, general availability