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Killing a project is every engineering leader’s hardest call

Sometimes you must kill a project before it kills momentum.
June 24, 2026

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Key takeaways:

  • Advocating for your team and advocating for a project are not the same thing. Defending a struggling project can deprive your team of the chance to work on something more impactful.
  • A shared rubric turns a painful conversation into a principled one.
  • Kill the project before it kills momentum. Making the call early doesn’t damage morale – it comes as a relief.

Most engineering leaders have learned to advocate, tenaciously, for the projects their teams work on. We tightly couple our team’s success to the success of every project we ship.

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