The Mindset way / Build your difference, not your plumbing

Why the launch date keeps moving

Barrie Hadfield, CEO & Co-founder Last updated October 3, 2026

If you have promised agents to your customers, you may recognize the pattern: the date moves, then moves again. The work is new and hard, but the delays usually share a cause.

Most teams build an agent the way they build any other feature, inside the product itself. Changing what the agent does then means a full product release. Around the agent sits what I call the plumbing: connecting it to other systems, controlling who can see what, keeping records and protecting personal data. Every agent needs it, and almost none of it makes your product different.

Once there is more than one agent, this never-ending work will continue to grow:

Every agent joins the same queue.

It waits for the same developers as the rest of your roadmap.

Only developers can change an agent.

A small fix that anyone, whether PM’s, SE’s or technical support, should be able to describe in a sentence waits weeks for a release.

Every customer wants its own version.

The same agent has to behave differently for each customer, with no data crossing between them, and each variation goes back into the same queue.

Every security review becomes a project.

Each new enterprise customer sends a questionnaire, and each answer turns into something to build.

Nobody can see what is going wrong.

Usage dips after launch, nobody can say what customers were asking for, and fixing it is another job for engineering to diagnose, plan a fix, do the work, then redeploy.

Your developers are not the problem; the queue is, and it is full of plumbing rather than the work that sets you apart.

Better AI models make agents smarter, but they do not shorten the queue.