Tough Decisions

I answered an interesting question today about projects that you spend months working on that get de-prioritized and/or canceled. The longer you've been around, the more familiar you'll get with projects that are bound to go nowhere. At a previous company, I spent a great deal of time leading an exciting project. It was supposed to be the IP with the potential to patent it. I was excited mostly because I wanted to deliver, and I was making good progress. It was showing promise but it wasn't production-ready. Given it was a startup, I was doing most of the work for it. I picked up a POC from my coworker and iterated on it like a maniac. This was possible because I was finally able to leverage some of my ML and computer vision knowledge.

Unfortunately, it didn't go as far as I hoped. I truly believed that what we were working on could provide incredible value to our users. It would have been the wow factor. In this case, I felt very fortunate; I was working with challenging yet cool stuff AND I would have provided real value to our customers. Startup life is unpredictable. We entered a tumultuous phase and things changed drastically. Events like this are not uncommon in startups. Sadly, I proposed to the new CEO that I stop working on the current project. I appreciated that she was letting me give it a shot, but realistically the plans for the future did not include what I was working on. Between that and people coming and going, it was hard to make significant progress if the team was split between projects. I wanted to help moving forward and had to make a tough decision.

Since I've been a manager, not having unlimited people on my team means I have to make these decisions more often. While certain ideas seem fascinating, we can't pursue them if they don't make sense to the user. With the economic climate of the last few years, add to that a path to profitability. But if it provides great value to the user, it doesn't matter which technology you use to deliver it.

Thoughts

This experience taught me several critical lessons about project management, particularly in the fast-paced and unpredictable environment of a startup. It underscored the importance of adaptability, prioritizing user value, and making tough decisions that align with the company's strategic goals. Even the most promising projects can be de-prioritized due to changing circumstances, requiring managers to stay focused on broader objectives and team dynamics.

This will occur again and again in my career. Sometimes, no matter how hard you want it to work, it just doesn't happen. Sometimes there's no market fit. I learned that it's important to stay lean and be able to move and evolve quickly. Tough decisions are good for growth and to build a thicker skin. While it's easier to get caught up with the latest and greatest, at the end of the day you need to serve users. You need to understand them and keep them at the center of it all. Learning to let go is something you'll carry with you for a long time.