Animals and plants use cue response systems to ensure that important life history activities, such as reproduction, are carried out during temporal windows of optimal environmental and biotic conditions. Such precise timing of life cycle activities can be adaptive, but the effects of climate change may render this approach detrimental to the fitness of individuals and persistence of populations. For example, climate change can generate mismatches, where an organism’s seasonal life cycle activities (phenology) become temporally misaligned with the availability of its key resources. Here we identify three categories of factors that interact to determine whether, and to what extent, consumer organisms will mismatch with the resources they rely on: environmental factors, organismal factors, and interspecific interactions. Environmental factors include the types and stability of abiotic cues (e.g., day length, temperature, rainfall) that animals use to synchronize life history activities with resource availability. Organismal factors, such as physiological tolerances and degree of phenotypic flexibility, affect how a focal consumer will respond to changes in its environment with regard to timing. Finally, organisms can be characterized by features of their interspecific interactions that affect their ability to remain temporally synchronized with resources, including the breadth of resources utilized, position in the trophic web, type of interaction (e.g., mutualism vs. parasitism), and evolutionary history of interactions. We present a framework that links these three types of factors with two possible phenological outcomes: timing match or mismatch.