Cold and rainy, it’s German autumn. Everything is damp, the boardwalk, my jeans and my shoes. I get into the office early, semi-soaked, nobody there yet. The air feels stale. I sit down, sad and defeated. My PC starts up. I wait until my face unlocks it. No password to mistype. I open Outlook.
Wait. An email from Neil?
He is the CTO. Four levels above me. I notice the time. He sent it very late. I open it immediately.
Yesterday was one of the worst days I ever had as a product manager. We killed my product. A new app the company badly needed. Customers had serious problems, internal teams too. Everyone wanted this thing. We had spent more than a year building it. Millions invested.
The technology was too new. Industry standards weren’t ready. Marketing kept pushing feature requests. We underestimated things, made mistakes. Bugs appeared, disappeared, came back. We fixed things and found new things. It just never ended. Nobody had messed it up alone. All of us had somehow contributed.
Still, everybody wanted to continue. The team still believed in it. Everyone kept hoping the finish line was just around the next bug’s corner. Including me. But even if you’ve already spent millions, the next million still costs another million. I had been deeply involved. I adapted the product scope and kept adjusted the timeline. Sometimes I fought the team. I had been demanding. Angry. Very disappointed and eventually exhausted. I often fought myself. By the end, I wanted it to work just so I could finally be done with it.
So for days, I prepared the big meeting. Neil would finally join our discussions. Technical issues, costs, risks, alternatives, consequences. All of it leading to one recommendation. The hardest recommendation I had ever made.
Kill it. Completely.
No more money. No extra six months. No glorious final push with inspiring background music from Hans Zimmer.
The meeting itself only took about an hour. Neil was hard. Extremely hard. We went deep. Technical details, our mistakes, the company image and alternatives. A lot of why. Neil kept asking questions. How did we get here? Why didn’t we stop earlier? Which technical problems could still be solved? What happens to our customers? What does this mean financially? The atmosphere stayed fair though. Neil was never rude, never insulting, never loud. Nobody got attacked personally. It was professional despite the obvious anger and frustration.
Eventually there was nothing left to discuss. My recommendation was up there on the final slide, shared across every screen.
Kill it. Completely.
Neil agreed. And that was it. A year of work gone for good. I got what I asked for. And I still left defeated.
I went back to the team. They hated it. Of course, they built the thing. They fought the bugs, solved so many of them nobody outside the team even knew existed. They spent a year trying to make this work. Long days, long evenings and many bad nights of sleep. And to them, I was the one who killed it. They knew I recommended it, I had explained it before. Still, I explained it again. Numbers, risks, technical reality, money. It didn’t help. They still hated it. You can’t argue emotions. They were frustrated, demotivated, angry. Same as me. At the situation, at us, at me.
I went home late feeling like shit. Later still, Neil sent the email.
“You prepared the meeting very well, Jonas. Because of that we were able to make a decision.”
I read it again. And again. The product is dead. The team is still angry. The money is gone. I am still sad. But also a little proud.
Neil doesn’t tell me things are fine. Doesn’t soften the failure. Our failure. Yesterday, he made that extremely clear. We must be better than this.
Still, he tells me I did well. And yes, it matters that it’s Neil. Let’s not pretend otherwise. He’s the CTO. I respect him. Smart, direct, very good in town halls, very little bullshit. I start answering. Typing. The office is still almost empty. The keyboard is the only noise. I might be hitting it too hard. It clatters very loud. Backspace. Again. Delete. More clatter. Too formal. Ctrl+Z. I try again. Too eager this time. Again. Why am I not getting this right?
So many replies to Neil I don’t send. So I start working instead. Still sad, still disappointed. But harder than ever before at that company. Neil didn’t ask me to. No motivational speech, no company values at play. He just wrote that email last night and hit Enter.
It takes me the whole day to finally hit Enter on my keyboard. By then, I am alone in the office, yet again. I respond with some generic thank you. Something about how difficult that decision and situation has been for all of us. The exact words don’t matter.
I’m not suddenly fine again. Not even close. But my defeat has its first crack.
I felt that part in my back teeth. Twenty years of office life and what I remember most clearly is how fast good work goes in the bin. And how quietly. It gets agreed to death, and the meeting moves on to the next item.
This is such a good description of the part of leadership nobody romanticizes.
Killing something after a year of work is not the hard part because the numbers are unclear. Sometimes the numbers are painfully clear. The hard part is that the decision can be right and still feel like failure to everyone who built it.
What Neil did well here, to me, was separate the quality of the decision from the outcome that preceded it. He didn’t pretend the project was fine. He didn’t erase the mistakes. He just recognized that you had done the work necessary to make a hard decision properly.
That matters more than people think, because otherwise teams learn a very dangerous lesson: that the only work worth being proud of is work that survives.
I’ve seen companies burn astonishing amounts of money because nobody wanted to be the person who said, “we have learned enough; stop.”
I’m curious, looking back now, do you think there was a moment earlier in the project when it should have been killed? Or was the real failure not stopping sooner, but not having a clear enough mechanism for deciding when “one more push” had become sunk-cost thinking?