“Look at Google. Its heartbeat is erratic, unpredictable. It works for them—mostly, sometimes—but it could work so much better. Google arguably only has one big external heartbeat each year at Google I/O—and most teams don’t bother aligning with it. They typically launch whatever they want whenever they want throughout the year, sometimes with real marketing behind it, other times with simple email campaigns. That means they can never communicate with their customers in a cohesive way about their entire organization. One team does this, another does that, their announcements either overlap or ignore obvious opportunities to create a narrative. And nobody, not customers, not even employees, can keep up. You need natural pauses so people can catch up to you—so customers and reviewers can give you feedback that you can then integrate into the next version. And so your team can understand what the customer doesn’t.”