A strong answer. “The first thing I would do is tell people, and I would do it the day I became confident rather than the day it became undeniable. Six weeks of warning is a decision; two weeks is an announcement. The single biggest determinant of how badly a slip lands is when it is communicated.

Before that conversation I want three things. Why — specifically, not ‘it took longer than expected’. Was the scope wrong, was there an unforeseen dependency, did we lose people, did quality force rework? The cause determines whether the new date is credible. What is still achievable by the original date — because the useful conversation is almost never all-or-nothing; it is which subset ships and what that subset is worth. What the new date is, with a confidence level, and what would have to be true for it to hold.

What I would not do is add people. Six weeks out, onboarding cost exceeds contribution and it makes the date worse while looking like action.

Then the harder half: I would want to say what I would change so this is caught earlier next time. Usually the answer is that we were tracking output rather than remaining uncertainty, and the slip was visible in the data three weeks before anyone said it out loud. Fixing that is worth more than recovering this date.”