How do you handle realistic timeline commitments?

The most damaging lie in software development is the optimistic timeline. "Sure, we can do that in six weeks" — said without scoping, without knowing the integration complexity, without buffer — is how projects become late, over-budget, and damaging to relationships.

Our approach: we don't give timelines before scoping. After scoping, we estimate each work item, add buffer for technical unknowns (typically 15–25% of the estimate), and identify which parts of the timeline we control and which we don't (third-party API approvals, client review cycles, procurement processes). The committed date reflects only what we control.

This means our timelines sometimes look longer than competitors' initial estimates. That's intentional. We'd rather set a realistic expectation and beat it than set an optimistic one and miss. In practice, we deliver within scope more than 90% of the time because our estimates are grounded in actual scoped work, not intuition.