Wonder why projects always take longer than expected? Multiply your time estimates by Pi, and you will be fine.

“Until when can you get this task done?”

“When can we expect an update on this?”

“I need this to be completed by tomorrow.”

We all know those requests from our daily lives. Customers, managers, and even employees want their priorities treated as priorities. But even with the best team, work ethic, and skills, most things take longer than expected. People don’t understand why and get frustrated about delays.

“Why does this take so long?”

“Can I escalate this issue?”

“You tell me you’re on it, but nothing happens.”

Here’s the secret: Even when you’re ambitious and on top of things, everything takes much longer than expected — as a rule of thumb, multiply your best estimate by Pi.

Why so conservative and multiply by roughly 3? Let’s look into some real-life examples from my life as the Founder & CEO of Yonder.

Dependencies

Let’s assume you have a single task to do today, and it’s a simple task. For example, chopping firewood. Zero dependencies, right? Not quite. If your saw isn’t sharp, this task will take much longer than anticipated. You can’t sharpen the saw yourself, so you decide to go and see a specialist who can sharpen the saw for you. Once you reach the specialist’s place, it’s closed. Maybe the guy is sick, on vacation, or busy sharpening other saws for other people. Even if you promised to chop the firewood until the end of the day, you won’t be able to complete this seemingly simple task within your promised timeline.

Let’s move into more complicated tasks, like building and maintaining a B2B SaaS product. Dependencies are everywhere, both technical and organizational. It doesn’t matter if the technical dependency needs to be solved on your side, or the organizational dependency is due to an open response from a customer who happens to be out of the office because of a national holiday in a different country, a vacation, or because it’s Ramadan. Welcome to the world of doing business globally.

Different Perspectives Needed

Some tasks seem easy at first sight, but they aren’t and need a second thought. Now and then, somebody reaches out to me with a weird proposal that sounds compelling at first sight. For example, the biggest companies on the planet like Boeing or Apple want to partner with us, a small B2B SaaS company. Of course, they always want an immediate response if they could count us in. But it pays off to first find out what exactly they are looking for and then discuss the proposal with key people on your team and your board. In almost all cases, adding those perspectives improves the decision of whether or not to pursue the proposed partnership — even when it comes at the price of a delayed decision.

Finding the Root Cause

Some problems are downright ugly. Consider software bugs that cannot be reproduced on your side, but keep occurring on the customer side.

Of course, such problems are always urgent from the customer’s perspective. And of course, we want to fix those bugs as quickly as possible. But sometimes finding the root cause that causes the bug takes way longer than what is acceptable to the customer, because the root cause is hidden deep down in an edge case of your software, or it’s because of a crazy IT security configuration on the customer’s side: Missing whitelisting, restrictive endpoint security software, blocked shaped traffic, you name it.

Even if solving such problems takes enormous amounts of time, it’s still better to fix them at the root cause level than applying a quick fix or a hack that only adds more dependencies to your software.

Conclusion

Good solutions take time, there is no way around it. Even if people don’t want to hear that you need more time than anticipated to solve their problems, it’s fair to tell them why you need more time.

But of course, that’s not an excuse to push things out that could be done quickly.