Why We Keep Feeding Projects That Have Already Failed
How sunk costs, fear, and optimism keep teams attached to projects that should have been retired long ago.
A few days ago, I had lunch with a very good friend of mine, and we ended up talking about a pattern I have seen many times: we sometimes hesitate to unplug a product or project even when it is already clear that it has failed.
That word — failure — can feel too heavy for many people. What I learned with time: failure is simply when a project, product, or feature did not meet the expectation we defined as success within the time we agreed on.
For example, we say project X should bring in revenue, users, or both. We expect that result within a specific number of weeks or months. Ideally, when that period ends, we sit down, review the original conditions, and decide whether the project met them. Maybe we even give it a little extra time, a small buffer, just in case reality needed a bit more runway.
What usually happens instead is very different. We keep changing the conditions. We keep adding features. We keep finding new reasons to extend the timeline. We keep telling ourselves that one more month, one more release, one more adjustment will finally make it work. And in the process, we keep spending more time, attention, and money on something that may already be dead.
Recognizing that a project has failed is not failure. It takes courage and critical thinking to admit when a project should be stopped. Sometimes a project does need more time to find its audience or mature into something useful. But that should not become an excuse we use every time things are not going well. We need discipline in defining success criteria before we start, and just as much discipline in honoring them when the time comes to make a decision.
Whenever I think about failed projects, I think about Google’s graveyard of discontinued products. It is a useful reminder that even one of the most successful companies in the world has killed hundreds of projects over time. That does not make Google weak. It shows that innovation at scale requires experimentation, and experimentation requires the ability to stop what is no longer working.
In that sense, failure is not the enemy. Avoiding reality is.
The organizations that do this well are not the ones that never fail. They are the ones that can identify failure early, make the hard call, and reallocate their energy toward something that has a better chance of succeeding. That kind of discipline is not pessimism. It is strategy.