You’ve cooked up the perfect business plan, only for engineering to laugh you out the room
Disproof
You’ve had maybe one conversation with someone who knows how much it costs to build things
Consequences
It is very easy to spend weeks ‘refining’ something that’s impossible to build; these papercuts add up and you end up quarters behind
You could operationalise and spend money on headcount/gear for a business that just won’t exist within your timeframes because you can't build the enabling product
Do the hilarious thing of promising a product to customers after a cracked-out whiteboard envisioneering session
At the very least you’ve wasted time and money, and likely pissed some people off
Causes
This is still surprisingly common in ‘product led’ companies that are actually product management led, where the PM lacks technical skill or common sense to verify early
Also occurs when decisions to solve a problem don’t come from the product team itself but again there, you have bigger problems
Can also be where engineers once got blamed for getting a high level estimate wrong, staunchly refused to make more/without exact details of what’s being built, and that’s just how it’s done now
Obviously, if engineers are silo’d or only assigned in a waterfall fashion this makes the problem 10x worse
Approaches
Maybe talk to the engineers?
But seriously, come to terms that all estimates have error margins and be clear that the less information an estimate is made with the bigger said margin. Then do your estimates and proceed with an operational budget for that risk
Be very sure that the ‘costs of not moving fast enough’ reeeeeally outway the costs that you’ll definitely pay of doing the opposite