A Pilot Without a Kill Date Is Just a Subscription You Forgot to Cancel
A pilot that cannot fail is not a pilot. It is a subscription with a nicer name, and you will keep paying for it long after everyone involved has quietly stopped believing in it. I have watched this happen in enough businesses now that I can predict the shape of it. Month one, everybody is in the WhatsApp group and the demo looks sharp. Month three, one person is still using it and two have gone…
A pilot that cannot fail is simply a recurring expense you failed to cancel. Once in operation, three forces make it impossible to set a proper end threshold. First, sunk cost bias causes people to champion the project even if it fails. Second, vendor pricing with annual discounts incentivizes continued use. Third, lacking a baseline metric makes it hard to determine if the pilot worked.
To avoid this, write down the baseline, single success metric, threshold, pilot end date, and the person responsible for killing the pilot before spending a single rupee.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
