Insight
What scaling teams get wrong about automation
Sunk cost is a terrible reason to keep going. Here's how we call it early.
Nobody likes pulling the plug. There’s a pilot, a team that’s proud of it, and a quiet hope that one more sprint will turn the corner. But the most expensive AI projects aren’t the ones that fail fast. They’re the ones nobody had the nerve to stop. So we build in the off-ramp before we start.
Decide what ‘working’ means on day one
Name the number before anyone writes code. If we can’t agree on what success looks like (hours saved, errors cut, a response time halved), that’s not a project, it’s a hope. And hope is impossible to cancel because it never had a finish line.
Set a date for the verdict. We pick a point, usually a few weeks in, where we look at the evidence together and make an honest call. Continue, adjust, or stop. The date is non-negotiable. Momentum is the easiest thing in the world to mistake for progress.
Why stopping is a win
A project killed in week three costs you three weeks. A project killed in month eleven costs you a year, a budget, and a team’s faith in the whole idea. When we call it early, you walk away with a sharper understanding of your own problem, and the money to spend it somewhere it’ll actually land.
Eric Lee
