The 6-Month CTO: When Developers Confuse Complexity with Value

I’ve seen this conversation a hundred times.

PM: “We need a survey system on our website. Something simple—let people vote on features.”

CTO: “Oof. That’s a big project. Six months, minimum.”

PM: “Six months for a survey? Let me get a freelancer.”

Two weeks later, the freelancer delivers a WordPress site with a survey plugin. Cost: $100 per hour. Time: 1 hour.

CTO: “That’s not a real solution. We can’t maintain that. It’s not built properly.”

But the survey was live. It was collecting data. It was solving the problem.

The Developer Trap

Here’s what I’ve learned after years of working with engineering teams: many developers confuse building things with delivering value.

They think in terms of:

• Architecture
• Scalability
• Technical purity
• “The right way to do it”

They rarely think about:

• What problem are we solving?
• Can we solve it faster?
• Is there a simpler way that works for now?
• What’s the minimum effort for maximum benefit?

When a developer says “six months,” they often mean: “Six months to build it the way I think it should be built.” Not: “Six months is the only way to solve this problem.”

Why This Matters for PMs

As a PM, you need to understand this bias. Developers aren’t trying to be difficult. They’re genuinely uncomfortable with shortcuts. They see technical debt. They see future maintenance problems. They worry about the wrong approach creating bigger problems later.

But here’s the thing: sometimes the shortcut IS the right answer.

A Stripe payment integration might take 2 weeks if you do it “properly.” Or it might take 2 days if you use a no-code solution. Both work. One gets you to market faster.

A basic analytics dashboard might take months if you build a data warehouse first. Or it might take days with a spreadsheet and Google Sheets API. Both give you data. One lets you decide what data actually matters.

Your job as PM isn’t to force developers into shortcuts. Your job is to ask better questions:

• What’s the actual problem we’re solving? (Not the technical problem—the customer problem)
• What’s the fastest way to test if this works? (Not the most correct way)
• When do we need to optimize this? (Maybe later, not now)
• What’s the cost of waiting six months? (Real customer cost, not theoretical technical cost)

The Smart PM Move

The best teams I’ve worked with did something interesting: they separated concerns.

• MVP: Done fast, possibly imperfectly, possibly outsourced, possibly even manual
• Iteration: Once we know it matters, we improve it
• Scaling: When it’s actually used at scale, we optimize for that

A good developer doesn’t say “six months to do it right.” A good developer says: “We can get something working in two weeks. Then, if it’s valuable, we can make it production-grade in another month.”

That’s the difference between a developer thinking like an engineer, and a developer thinking like a PM.

The Navision Lesson

Remember Navision CRM? (Now part of Microsoft Dynamics.)

In the early days, their CRM module was laughably simple. It was literally a table with filters. You could have done the same thing in Excel with a shared link.

But it solved the problem. It was reliable. It worked. And it made their salespeople happy.

Zoho, on the other hand, built the “proper” solution. More features than any competitor. Technical sophistication. But it was buggy at launch and hard to use.

Guess who won the market? The team that understood that solving a real problem simply beats solving a hypothetical problem perfectly.

What This Means for Your Career

If you’re breaking into PM, learn to ask developers the right questions. Not to push back on estimates, but to understand what’s really involved.

If you’re a developer reading this: your CTO isn’t wrong to worry about technical debt. But your PM isn’t wrong to want to move fast either. The answer isn’t “do it right or don’t do it.” The answer is “do it simply, then improve it.”

The best products in the world didn’t start perfect. They started useful. And they got better because millions of people were actually using them, telling the team what mattered.

Your six-month project might be valuable in six months. Or it might solve a problem nobody actually has.

The freelancer’s one-hour solution? It proved the problem was real, and it solved it immediately.

That’s not a shortcut. That’s product thinking.