Time to market: balancing speed and confidence

Product is execution, and speed in execution can be your biggest differentiator in the market. What can make or break your company. Yet there is one important component that affects the equation and is not often talked about: the company’s willingness to take risks.

The faster you want the speed to be, the bigger the risks you need to be willing to accept.

You can move towards two extremes. On one hand, you could build your product with no initial hypothesis validation and test it directly in the market. This route can be costly, but if speed is what you're optimizing for, it might be your quickest way to obtain feedback.

On the other hand, you might opt for a bullet-proof, thoroughly vetted, and compliant product. Here, you've conducted your research, accommodated the majority of your stakeholders' feedback to ensure everyone is comfortable with the release, and anticipated any foreseeable issues. Your goal in this scenario is to minimize risks.

Let's look at some examples of companies and where they might fall on the risk/time-to-market scale (note: these observations are based on publicly available information; I have no insider knowledge of these companies):

• High risk, low time-to-market: Klarna 
  Klarna is recognized for its risk-taking behavior, sometimes even in legal matters. Their risk appetite is high, as is the speed at which they challenge banking competitors in various markets. I would argue that their daring approach is what helped them in creating the position they have in the digital payment space.

• Low risk, high time-to-market: Apple
  Releases at Apple are a famous ” once-in-a-year event”. It happened that some products failed, but Apple never gets out there with a product that is not close to perfection. Superior user experience is the leading star, and time-to-market suffers. Apple's approach to launching products is what gained them their reputation and position in the market: perfection is what is expected from them, and what they optimize for. Taking the extra time it entails.

• From high risk to low risk: Facebook
  The early days of Facebook were all about speed—"move fast and break things." was the famous motto of the company. This approach was a key factor in their initial hyper-success. However, as the stakes have grown, especially around issues like fake news and social media's impact on society, Facebook has had to adjust to reflect a more cautious approach to product development. We have not seen many fast and broken things lately, and I believe we will not in the future either.
  

The most of us? We operate in the middle. Validating our riskiest assumption properly, and doing some research so that we do not completely waste engineering time with a wrong product to market. Balancing speed and confidence, or picking one or the other depending on the case.

But the real question is: do you know where your company stands when it comes to risks? Do you take the discussion case by case or are you given a clear line to follow? What happens when you launch something that optimizes for time to market but is not perfect or the other way around?  And how do you account for that when executing?

I would love to hear real-life examples of how different companies work with this.