The business model used to drive the TC feature release and Beta/GA timelines makes no sense. It is quite different from any other (successful) cloud-based company that I've worked for.
These timelines seem to be driven ENTIRELY by customer demand. You might consider this a good thing, but it is not accounting for the actual low-level work involved to meet the timeline. Arbitrary dates are agreed upon by sales, leadership, the field, and PMs - who only understand work items at an extremely high-level, if that.
There are all sorts of things that should FIRST be accounted for BEFORE overpromising to customers, and then missing dates or burning out TD engineers:
- the engineering work involved
- possible tech issues along the way that could slow release
- PE release cycle and automation ability (how quickly or slowly have they realistically released in the past)
- Many other things..
Their way of doing things today puts them in the unnecessary position of over-promising and under-delivering, destroying trust with customers.
What they should do instead is give a very GENERAL timeline, if anything, rather than committing to specific dates. Every other competitor is in that same boat, so TD would not be losing an edge by using this approach with prospective or existing customers.
The other thing that TC gets wrong is its release model and cadence. They do not use CICD pipelines, which would be much more appropriate for complex VCL infra deployments.
Instead they release everything as if it was one monolithic software library. This unnecessarily puts engineering in a position where they cannot iterate and react quickly to moment-to-moment live factors in VCL development. Thus it slows them down by weeks and even months, using all sorts of bad practices in between to try and compensate.