Ali Aydan says; The Certificate Was Due in Eight Weeks.
It Took Five Months.
By the time it arrived, the product had been finished for a season. The packaging was printed. A launch plan built around a promised date had quietly come apart.
Nobody in the test house had done anything wrong. The mistake was ours.
We’d built a commercial timetable on a date we didn’t control.
Here’s what that episode taught me. A certification delay doesn’t create execution risk. It reveals it. Dig into any certification crisis and you rarely find a slow laboratory. You find a company that heard a lead time and recorded a promise. The lab said eight weeks under ideal conditions. The plan said eight weeks, full stop. And by the time the queue did what queues do, expectation had hardened into commitments the business couldn’t keep.
Even governments get caught. Britain’s own UKCA marking deadline moved three times before CE recognition was extended indefinitely. When a whole regulatory regime has to bend around certification reality, one company’s confident timeline deserves more scepticism than it usually gets.
We changed two things. Milestones now enter the commercial calendar only when the proof behind them exists. And nothing goes on a product page, a spec sheet, or a partner deck until the certificate is in hand. Not when the results look certain. When the paper exists.
My latest piece for Forbes Business Development Council is about what certification delays reveal about how a company actually runs, and the disciplines that stop a testing queue from becoming a commercial crisis.
Read More: https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinessdevelopmentcouncil/2026/07/31/built-not-borrowed-recurring-revenue-is-earned-not-installed/
See post on LinkedIn:
Ali Aydan’s social media: