Retailers and brands have spent years trying to improve speed to market. They’ve eliminated milestones, overlapped activities, compressed product development lead times, and introduced speed lanes to get products into stores and customers’ hands faster.
Yet despite these efforts, many organizations still struggle to move at the speed their business demands.
Why? Because they’ve changed the calendar without fundamentally changing how the organization operates.
Think about it. You can eliminate six weeks from your go-to-market (GTM) calendar, but if every decision still requires the same approvals, the same meetings, and the same people, have you actually created a faster business?
You can’t create a faster business by asking the same organization to follow a faster calendar.
As we explored in our earlier article, Where Did Speed Go?, improving speed to market means examining how the entire business operates—not simply compressing the traditional product development timeline.
At Thread Advisory Group, we believe the foundation of retail speed to market isn’t calendar compression. It’s decision architecture: how decisions are made, who has the authority to make them, what information is required, and when commitments need to happen.
The Hidden Complexity Behind the Calendar
Most organizations can tell you when a decision is scheduled. Far fewer can explain why it needs to happen at that particular moment.
Over time, GTM calendars evolve. Decisions get moved earlier to accommodate leadership availability. Reviews are consolidated because the right people are already in the room. Additional checkpoints are introduced to address previous challenges. Functional teams request more time to complete downstream activities.
Individually, these adjustments often make sense.
But across multiple planning cycles, they compound. A decision moves two weeks earlier, another checkpoint shifts, and additional buffers become embedded in the process. Eventually, the organization may be making commitments six or eight weeks earlier than originally required, without anyone intentionally designing it that way.
This is calendar creep.
The problem isn’t necessarily that decisions have moved earlier. If the organization has the information it needs and nothing meaningful will be learned by waiting, deciding sooner may be exactly right.
The problem is that the original business logic behind the timing has been lost.
And when organizations approach GTM calendar optimization by simply compressing their existing timelines, they often preserve the very inefficiencies that created the problem.
Before changing a milestone date, we need to understand the decisions behind it.
The Right Decision at the Right Time
One of the most important distinctions in end-to-end product development is understanding the difference between when a decision can be made and when it must be made.
When can we make the decision?
Do we have sufficient information? Have the critical inputs been resolved? Do we understand the tradeoffs and potential consequences?
When must we make the decision?
What is the last responsible decision point before we jeopardize supplier capacity, production, cost, quality, or delivery?
These two questions create a decision window.
Within that window, the goal isn’t automatically to decide as early or as late as possible. It’s to understand whether additional time creates value.
Will we learn something meaningful from another two weeks of selling data? Are we waiting for critical material testing? Could updated demand signals change our assortment or inventory commitment?
If the answer is yes, preserving flexibility may be valuable.
If the answer is no, waiting simply introduces unnecessary time into the process.
Equally important, some decisions need to be made early because they unlock downstream activities. Delaying those decisions can create bottlenecks that ripple across the entire product development lifecycle.
Making a decision earlier isn’t inherently faster. Making it later isn’t inherently smarter. The goal is to make it when the business is ready and the consequences are understood.
A Meeting Is Not a Decision
Even with the right decision timing, organizations often face another obstacle: decision authority.
Many retailers have built their operating models around milestone meetings. Line reviews, assortment reviews, product approvals, and executive checkpoints become the mechanisms through which the business moves forward.
But a meeting isn’t inherently a decision. And a completed milestone doesn’t necessarily mean meaningful progress has occurred.
How often do teams leave a review meeting with more follow-up items than actual decisions? And how often does a decision get revisited because someone wasn’t in the room? How frequently does a functional team wait for leadership approval on something it is fully capable of deciding?
These approval bottlenecks aren’t necessarily calendar problems. They’re symptoms of unclear decision rights and accountability across merchandising, design, sourcing, and other cross-functional teams.
Traditional governance models, including RACI charts, can help clarify responsibilities. But knowing who is responsible, accountable, consulted, or informed doesn’t always establish who has the authority to make a decision independently.
This is why ThreadSpeed™ emphasizes decision architecture.
Leaders need to establish clear strategic direction, financial parameters, brand standards, and risk guardrails. Functional teams then need the authority and accountability to make decisions within those boundaries.
Not every decision belongs in an executive meeting.
Leadership checkpoints remain important, but their purpose should be to establish direction, resolve meaningful tradeoffs, and manage exceptions—not approve every action required to move the business forward.
If every decision requires leadership approval, your organization can only move as fast as your leaders’ calendars.
Understand What You’re Committing To
There’s another critical dimension to improving speed to market that often gets overlooked: not every decision carries the same consequences.
Approving a product direction isn’t necessarily the same as committing inventory. Establishing an assortment strategy doesn’t always require finalizing every SKU. Reserving production capacity doesn’t necessarily mean locking every product detail.
Yet organizations frequently bundle these decisions together within a single milestone.
The result can be unnecessary early commitments or delayed progress while teams wait for information that isn’t actually required for the next decision.
These commitments also extend beyond the retailer. As we explored in Rethinking Brand–Manufacturer Partnerships for Speed, the timing of commitments influences how brands and manufacturers share capacity, flexibility, and risk.
A decision-led operating model distinguishes between decisions that establish direction, decisions that unlock activity, and decisions that create financial or operational commitments.
It also recognizes which decisions can be reversed and which become increasingly costly or difficult to change.
The objective isn’t to avoid commitment. Businesses need commitments to move forward.
It’s to make those commitments deliberately, with a clear understanding of what flexibility is being gained or surrendered.
Stop Managing Dates. Start Designing Decisions.
So, what does all of this mean for brands and manufacturers trying to create greater speed? It comes down A faster retail organization doesn’t emerge from a more aggressive calendar. It emerges when decision timing, authority, information, and accountability work together across the entire go-to-market process.
That requires asking different questions.
Instead of asking, “How many weeks can we remove from our product development timeline?” ask, “What decisions are preventing us from moving faster?”
Instead of asking, “When is the next approval meeting?” ask, “Who has the authority and information to make this decision now?”
And instead of assuming every milestone is necessary, challenge what actually needs to happen—and why.
At Thread Advisory Group, this is the thinking behind ThreadSpeed™. We start with how the organization operates, not simply the dates on its calendar.
Because when you redesign how decisions get made, you create the conditions for speed that is sustainable, intentional, and connected to business outcomes.
A faster calendar is an output. A faster organization is the objective.
Ready to learn more?
At Thread Advisory Group, we’re on a mission to radically change how retailers approach go-to-market and speed. Thread Speed™ is how we’re turning that belief into a new way of operating, one that builds speed into the business instead of chasing it after the fact.
Connect with us or learn more at Thread Advisory Group.
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This blog was written by Anna Kenney, Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Thread Advisory Group.
A merchant at heart, Anna led the Instant Yoga program at Victoria’s Secret PINK, where she helped build one of the fastest retail speed to market models of its time. With nearly 20 years of experience across merchandising, operations, and consulting, she now partners with retail organizations to align strategy, product, and operating models from strategy to solution.
Get in touch with her here.
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