Sprinting Without the Critical Path

Ever hit every sprint goal and still miss the deadline? This episode explains why.

Many teams think they're sprinting, but they're still trapped by hidden dependencies, approvals, and late integration work. It feels fast, but the results are slow. We cover what "moving fast" actually looks like when you're dealing with complex programs—and how to track progress without pretending you can predict everything upfront.

Agile vs. FTTM

Both want speed, but they solve different problems.

Agile is about learning as you go - small chunks, constant adaptation, delivering value piece by piece. It shines when requirements are fuzzy and you need to figure things out.

FTTM (Fast Time To Market) is about hitting a date - mapping dependencies, finding bottlenecks, and attacking them. It shines when you're coordinating multiple teams, suppliers, or hardware.

The simple version: Agile helps you build the right thing. FTTM helps you deliver it sooner. They work well together—Agile within teams, FTTM across the program.

In “The Freedom Scale: A Continuum of Team Empowerment,” the conversation digs into a super-practical question: how do you build teams that can move fast and ship real outcomes without turning into chaos? Using the idea of “heavyweight teams” (teams empowered to own an outcome end-to-end) and a Freedom Scale (a clear way to define what decisions the team can make on its own vs. what needs alignment), the episode breaks down how to set decision rights, avoid death-by-handoff, and create the kind of autonomy that actually increases speed instead of risk. If you’ve ever watched a “cross-functional team” get stuck waiting on approvals, dependencies, or invisible rules, this one gives you language and tactics to redesign the system so teams can truly own delivery.

This is a discussion of a migration strategy for evolving organizational structures into high-performance, cross-functional teams. The framework transitions from basic functional hierarchies toward autonomous units that integrate engineering, operations, and marketing to increase operational speed. Central to this model is the Freedom Scale, a continuum of empowerment that defines the level of managerial control—ranging from "wait until told" for trainees to "act with routine reporting" for self-directed experts. Core team roles are clearly defined, including a Program Director for executive leadership, a Systems Architect for technical vision, and a Steering Arm of senior executives to provide strategic resources. Ultimately, the sources emphasize that project ownership and dedicated membership are essential for achieving rapid, successful product development.

In Part C of Episode 5 of the “FTTM is not Project Management” debate, the conversation gets practical: the hosts dig into where the line actually is between “FTTM” work and traditional Project Management work, why people keep mashing the roles together, and what breaks when you do. Expect pointed pushback, real-world examples, and a few “okay, but then who owns that?” moments, ending with takeaways you can use to clarify responsibilities, set better expectations, and stop the same arguments from looping forever.

Here are the top 3 differences (FTTM = Fast Time To Market) versus traditional Project Management:

1. The goal: “pull-in” vs “hold the plan”
   FTTM is explicitly about finishing sooner—a continuous effort to accelerate the schedule and hit the market window (“right product, right time”). Traditional PM is usually about delivering to the baseline (scope/schedule/cost), and a lot of the machinery is built around managing variance once it appears.
2. How the schedule is used: driver vs reporting artifact
   In FTTM, the schedule is the driver of behavior: it’s built to show the gap between the target date and the “real” finish date early, and it’s used to create urgency and action. In traditional PM, the schedule often degrades into a status/reporting tool (updated for governance, not to actively change how the team works day-to-day).
3. Cadence + ownership: daily team refresh vs PM-centric coordination
   FTTM emphasizes full team involvement, daily refresh planning (update → break down → pull-in), and trend tracking so the team can react before the slip (not after). It also pushes cross-silo integration (“lateralized” workflows tied to customer deliverables) rather than functional handoffs. Traditional PM more commonly runs on periodic updates, hierarchical decision-making, and coordination across silos.

In FTTM is not Project Management we contrast conventional project management with Fast-Time-to-Market (FTTM) strategies, emphasizing the need for proactive transparency and unified ownership. Rather than relying on "happy schedules" that ignore risks to avoid conflict, effective teams bring pain forward by identifying potential failures early to create a genuine sense of urgency. The text details how distributed teams and multi-company partnerships can overcome alignment gaps by utilizing empowered core teams and integrated schedules that prioritize the project over individual functional hierarchies. Key solutions involve co-location, frequent face-to-face interaction, and clear accountability to ensure that technical and managerial decisions are made quickly. Ultimately, lateralworks research advocates for a shift from a defensive, blame-avoidant culture to a high-visibility environment where risks are mitigated through honest, data-driven planning.

In this episode, we dig into a provocative idea: Fast-Time-to-Market (FTTM) isn’t “better project management”—it’s a different way of thinking about how work gets defined, decided, and driven to launch. You’ll hear why classic PM habits (plans, timelines, coordination) often can’t fix the real causes of delay, and what does move the needle instead: continually validating customer value, tightening ownership from concept through break-even, speeding decisions, and building a system that relentlessly “pulls in” the schedule rather than accepting slip as normal. If you’ve ever watched a project drift while everyone stays “busy,” this conversation will feel uncomfortably familiar—and very useful.

In Build Lateral Core Teams for Market Speed, the conversation gets into the real mechanics of moving faster without turning your org into chaos: why “core teams” beat endless handoffs, how to design small cross-functional groups with clear ownership and decision rights, and what operating rhythms (intake, prioritization, feedback loops, metrics) keep work flowing instead of stalling. Expect practical takes on where teams usually get stuck—dependency spaghetti, unclear accountability, competing priorities—and concrete ways to fix it so you can ship, learn, and adapt at market speed while still keeping quality and alignment intact.

If you've ever spent weeks building a detailed project schedule only to watch it become obsolete within days, this episode is for you. The FTTM Podcast dives into why traditional planning is often just "expensive wallpaper" and introduces a radically different approach: one where being roughly right beats being exactly wrong, where you deliberately ignore resource constraints to expose the real gap in your timeline, and where a "wiggling" finish date is actually a sign of health while a perfectly flat line should terrify you. The hosts break down practical concepts like macro-to-micro planning, refresh rhythms, and "peeling the onion" to manage hidden critical paths—all designed to transform your schedule from a document of doom into a tool that actually buys back time. Whether you're stuck in a death march or just tired of watching projects crash in slow motion, this episode offers a surprisingly liberating framework for how the fastest teams actually plan.