Great start and I’d offer some encouragement for further exploration. The big question is “why is a deadline (launch date) important?” It’s only in the commitment to customers, internal stakeholders and financial stakeholders that it creates conflict; thus, through expectation setting and good partnership, there is an opportunity to align the other factors with a common cadence. Scope and launch date cannot both be fixed, as estimation is inherently imperfect. And Parkinson’s law is a real challenge. Thus, agile addresses this through frequent incremental releases, better understanding of minimum requirements, customer interaction, etc. However, adapting this cadence to external factors (i.e. competitive conditions) and the demands of the financial stakeholders is where this iterative approach must be pushed upstream to develop better models of planning and communication or we once again end up here: https://medium.com/@sgblank/is-the-lean-startup-dead-71e0517294a0.