One of the things that kept me busiest on this project was making product decisions on a daily basis to try keep to the hard deadline.

This was a constant juggling act between what we needed to get to market, what the small development team could achieve and what customers would want to use and might pay for.

My opinion was that version 1.0 would be not good enough to get any significant traction and that it would take many more months of constant design & development including regular experiments with an in-house development team which I wanted to build out.

Regardless, the product had to be released on schedule to meet certain market narratives. A clear constraint.