Cause of Death · 3 exhibits

Timing Failure

A timing failure is when a product is right in concept but wrong in decade — launched before the infrastructure, buyer behavior, or complementary market it depends on actually exists, or launched after a window of buyer attention and willingness has already closed. Early timing failures are the more common and more forgivable of the two: the team correctly identifies a future direction but underestimates how long the ecosystem takes to catch up, and runs out of capital before the market arrives. Late timing failures happen when a genuinely competent product enters a category after a competitor has already captured the default choice, and being merely as good is no longer enough to displace an established habit. Timing failures are hardest to diagnose in the moment, because the same evidence — slow early adoption — looks identical whether the market is about to arrive in eighteen months or never.