Design for the first 90 days
I have started treating the first 90 days as the real KPI in media and tech. Not because I love the idea of everything being reduced to a window, but because that window is increasingly what decides momentum, funding, and shelf life. It is the period where a project earns the right to keep existing in public.
I see it across film releases, product launches, and campaigns. The early signal is not just measurement. It becomes the story people tell about the work. If the first three months land softly, the narrative can flip fast from potential to problem, even when the underlying craft is strong.
Even the biggest platforms are openly built around this clock. Netflix, for example, frames viewership in the first 91 days, and that framing shapes how shows are judged at the source. When distribution defines the scoreboard, creators and marketers end up designing for the scoreboard.
What I find most consequential is how this compresses creative risk into a short runway. It is harder to justify slow burns, tonal pivots, or narratives that take time to settle. On the other hand, it rewards teams that intentionally design the early arc, rather than hoping the work will somehow find its audience later.
What it means for the industry
I think production and marketing will continue stacking effort earlier in the timeline. More testing before release. Earlier audience beats. Faster edit cycles. In software terms, it feels like shipping is less the finish line and more the start of an aggressively instrumented sprint.
If the 90 day window is the lens, I suspect success will tilt toward modular storytelling and staggered reveals. Chapters that give people clean entry points. Companion assets that extend the world. Community touchpoints that have a weekly rhythm. Not because every story should become a series, but because consistent surfaced moments help the work stay legible in a crowded feed.
The risk, to me, is chasing spikes that do not age well. I have watched campaigns win a weekend and lose a month. I have watched products optimize onboarding so hard that they flatten the deeper reasons people stick around. Durable work still needs room to breathe and find fit beyond week four, even if the industry increasingly pretends that everything important happens immediately.
A practical move I keep coming back to is planning 30, 60, 90 from day one. I prefer shipping smaller, learning in public, and tuning the story as signals arrive. That can mean a tighter first cut, a clearer first use case, or a launch plan that assumes iteration is part of the public narrative rather than a private scramble.
I actually like the clarity this brings, when it is used well. It forces craft to meet data instead of letting data flatten taste. The best teams I have worked with do not worship metrics, but they do respect feedback loops and they design with intention.
My takeaway is simple. I treat the 90 day window as a design constraint, not a panic button. If I build the early arc on purpose, I can give the work a real shot at momentum without sacrificing what makes it worth making in the first place.
Joshua Campbell
Director