Things Take the Time They Take: A 42nd Thought at 42

Things Take the Time They Take: A 42nd Thought at 42 via Brad Frost

You can’t make a baby in one month by throwing nine people at it.

I think I had heard this quote before but after thinking about it for a little while I think I will definitely be using it in the future. As someone who has spent decades now discussing timelines and setting expectations this really hits home for me.

Often you will get an important project and the desire is to throw as many people at it to get it done fast. There are many problems with this but one that keeps coming up is only so many people can reasonably work on the same thing. Sure a larger change (epic in agile parlance) can possibly be broken down into independently workable stories but the dependencies between those stories will often get in the way.

Many things you will build within a system need to talk to other systems which means the stories require sequencing.

There is also an element here of too many cooks and how the bigger the number of participants the larger variation one part may have from the other.

Brad’s larger point is that quality things take time which I agree with. The idea of release notes for all the things you did not ship is really good. Building anything often means saying no to a lot of things. This does not mean those things are bad, in fact saying no to good things is essential to shipping great things. There is truth in having to much of a good thing(s).

This is day 56 of 100 Days To Offload.

This is day 3 of Blaugust 2026.