Killing the Project I Sold to Everyone

I told four people to try a restaurant downtown once, talked it up for weeks, and when it got shut down for a health code violation I still felt the urge to defend the food. Not the place. The food.

That's roughly what it felt like killing a project I'd spent six months telling the whole company was the right call.

We'd built a chunk of the roadmap around it. I'd stood up in three all-hands and said this one was worth the resourcing fight, this was going to matter. Then the numbers came in flat for the second quarter running and it was obvious to everyone in the room, including me, that it wasn't going to work. The decision itself took about ten minutes. Kill it, reassign the team, move on.

The part I wasn't ready for was standing in front of the same people I'd sold it to and saying I was wrong. Not "the market shifted." Not "we learned something valuable." Wrong. I'd told them it was a good idea and it wasn't, and I was the one who had to say so out loud.

I noticed myself looking for reasons to give it one more quarter. More data. A tweak. A different angle on the same feature. None of it was really about the product anymore, it was about not wanting to be the guy who was loudly confident and then loudly incorrect. There's a name for that, sunk cost, and I'd been running the unnamed version of it for years before I ever heard the term — the time and the money were already spent either way, the only real decision left was whether I was going to spend more of it just to avoid one uncomfortable meeting.

I killed it. I still don't know if I killed it fast enough, or if the extra month I gave it first was genuine diligence or just me working up the nerve.

What I landed on, and I'm not fully sure of it: the correction should be at least as public as the original claim was. If I stand up and say something is the priority, I owe the room the same volume when I turn out to be wrong.

If you've had to reverse a call you made loudly, did you correct it as loudly as you made it, or let it fade quietly?