Course · 3 chapters
Ship the Product, Not the Date
Three chapters, one failure mode. First the evidence: Sonos held its launch window and shipped an app missing alarms and accessibility features, and the bill — apology, layoffs, a 16% revenue drop, the CEO's job — arrived over eight documented months. Then the other branch of the same fork: Cyberpunk 2077 moved its date three times and refused to move anything else, paying in crunch and a storefront delisting. The capstone is a facilitation script you can run with your own team: a 45-minute Liberating Structures TRIZ session where the group designs the disaster from scratch, discovers how much of the recipe it already practices, and commits to stopping one piece of it.
- 01
Case: Sonos shipped the date
In May 2024, Sonos replaced its app with a ground-up rewrite that shipped without alarms, sleep timers, and accessibility features, reportedly to hit the launch window for its first headphones. The invoice arrived on a schedule: a public CEO apology in July, around 100 layoffs and a $20–30 million remediation estimate in August, a 16% revenue drop in the SEC-filed fourth quarter, and the CEO's exit on January 13, 2025. The freshest, best-documented case of an organization shipping the deadline instead of the product.
9 min - 02
Case: the deadline that moved three times
Cyberpunk 2077's release date moved three times in a single year — April to September to November to December 2020 — and each move was the plan absorbing information the organization refused to respond to. Scope didn't move. Marketing promises didn't move. The gap was paid first in mandatory overtime, then in a launch so broken Sony pulled the game from its store. The closing post of this series, on what 'responding to change' costs when you decline to pay for it.
10 min - 03
Workshop: the TRIZ session
A ready-to-run Liberating Structures TRIZ workshop built on the Sonos May 2024 app launch. In 45 minutes, your team designs the disaster from scratch — immovable date, big-bang rewrite, no rollback — then discovers how much of the recipe they already practice, and commits to stopping one piece of it. Full facilitation script, answer key, and debrief included.
6 min