You’re Ready. But Are You Really?

Understanding The Five Types of Ready

In a board meeting last quarter, as the CTO said to everyone, “We are ready with that program,” I watched the board smile and nod in happiness. Having seen this before, I followed my gut and asked, “Mr. CTO, do you mean, CTO ready? Engineering ready? Product management ready? Conformance, quality, and compliance ready? Or, do you mean customer ready?” At that point, the CTO looked at me and said, “I mean the first one,” and the rest of the board immediately realized that we needed to have a very different discussion for the next half of the meeting.

The lesson to be learned, particularly when working with technical groups and on complicated development programs, is that it is critical to define what level your definition of readiness is in order to know when things are actually ready to be handed from one person to another or to move from one stage to the next. This is one of the fundamental tenets of the early product lifecycle / product management system stages. We can help you solve these types of communication and alignment problems to ensure you really are Ready.