I picked this concept in Uni a couple of semesters ago and its revolutionised how I perceive rapid software development for purposes of deployment.
First I kind of noticed that in the era of AI-assisted development, shipping software has paradoxically become harder.
Developers and vibe coders are building apps in days, yet many of these products never make it to production. Teams get trapped in endless feature development, mistaking progress for momentum. The real problem is no longer code creation. It is deployment.
The Critical Path Model (CPM) exists to solve this exact problem and is suited for teams that have been stuck in development for too long, or for founders who want to ship fast in order to test real market viability.
What is the Critical Path Model?
It is a development discipline that forces you to identify the minimum chain of non-negotiable tasks required to ship a viable product to real users.
This chain is the critical path.
Any task, feature, or improvement that does not belong to this chain is noise and should be cut.
The goal of CPM is to enforce developmental discipline. To aggressively shorten time-to-deployment. It prevents teams from building features that reflect personal interests or engineering pride, and instead wants you to focus on what the business actually needs in order to exist.
How the Critical Path Is Identified
- Break the project into all necessary tasks.
- Estimate the time required for each task.
- Identify dependencies between tasks.
- Map all possible paths from project start to deployment.
- Identify the critical path: the longest dependency-bound path that determines the earliest possible deployment date.
This path defines the minimum time required to ship. Nothing outside it affects whether the product reaches the market.
What Makes a Task “Critical”? And how avoid over engineering for useless features.
Every task which you list as necessary must first pass a simple filter.
For every task, ask:
If this is missing, can we still ship, charge, and learn within 30 days?
• If the answer is yes → not critical path
• If the answer is no → critical path
A task belongs on the critical path only if it meets at least one of the following conditions:
- Blocks a user from receiving the core value
- Prevents completion of the primary user task or promise
- Breaks end-to-end transaction flow
- Prevents deployment or stable operation in production
- Introduces legal, regulatory, or compliance risk
- Blocks revenue capture or validated market signal
- Causes the product to function only in theory, not in reality
- Cannot be temporarily replaced by a manual process
Anything that does not meet these criteria is not essential to shipping. It is optional work masquerading as progress.
Why CPM Matters
CPM is not about building perfect software. It is about building deployable software.
In a world where tooling makes it easy to build endlessly, CPM provides a counterweight: ruthless prioritization, strict sequencing, and a bias toward reality over elegance.
In short
The Critical Path Model is a discipline for shipping. If a task does not directly enable deployment, value delivery, legal safety, or learning from real users, it does not belong in the build. Sequence matters more than scope.