Member-only story
While we should try our best on our projects, things are not always go along our ways. Some projects may never work out regardless how much effort and time we put in. That is why we should keep in mind with exit conditions for our projects.
An exit condition may be initial unsatisfactory metrics, unexpected dependencies or workloads. While the first things to try should be to find some quick patches to fix things, we should also keep in mind that we can abort the projects.
I have a failure in a project. By failure, I mean the project was aborted despite a large amount of time and effort invested in it. At first, I got a small project that required small changes. But when I was working on it, I found out that the performance was not satisfactory because there were several edge cases that needed to be covered. As I worked on it, I found out there were more edge cases that would require a large overhaul, and the effort outweighed the benefits, so after discussion with the leads, I aborted the project despite investing a large amount of time and effort.
There are things I don’t know, and there are more things that I don’t know I don’t know, that could be hidden on small things. But what I could do better is to think about the exit condition, to constantly evaluate the timeline against my progress; sometimes we need to seek external help or sometimes we might need to abandon the project because the assumption on the project can change. But it would be better to fail early and fail fast.
