Budget for surprises, not just to-dos

When the development team estimated the new app would ship in three months, the founders cheered. They’d built similar features before, after all. By month two, everything was late. One by one, integrations broke, data migrations stalled and half the SDKs failed.

They’d stuck to the shining path in their slides, but reality lurked beneath—servers overloaded, design revisions, legal reviews, UX tweaks—and none of it made it into the plan.

Crisis meetings turned into blame sessions. The founders looked back and wondered, “Why did we think three months would do it?” They’d suffered the planning fallacy: when we focus only on our vision, we underestimate messy details.

Then they ran a pre-mortem. Picture the app live and dead in the market; name every reason it tanked. They ended up with a 40% time buffer, twice the testing budget and backup providers for every service.

In the next cycle, they hit each date—without surprises derailing them—because they mapped the unknown unknowns and budgeted for reality, not just idealism.

You know how plans unravel: friction creeps in, details multiply, deadlines slip. Stop underestimating these twists. First, research three past projects like yours and note their true timelines and costs. Then pad every key deadline and budget item by at least 20%. Finally, hold a ‘pre-mortem’—imagine the launch has failed and list every reason why, then build in safeguards. Your future self will breathe easier and hit every milestone. Try it before your next big deadline.