I’ve made that argument and lost. I once tried to talk a company out of an expensive AI practice that wasn’t working. I was right. The portfolio kept it anyway, and the teams around it starved.
Being right in the meeting didn’t fix it. Agreeing before the meeting does. A team that writes down, before a project starts, what would make it stop, pivot, or invest doesn’t need anyone to be brave later. The call’s already on paper.
My workshop ends with three of these, in your team’s words, about your own project. Here’s a worked example:
- STOP
- If we have to pull data from third-party sources to ship this, we scrap it and put the resources somewhere else.
- PIVOT
- If the AWS bill is projected to jump more than 10% on release, we take the cost out before we ship, not after.
- INVEST
- If beta sign-ups come in at twice our projection, we make time to talk about expanding this.
I help product teams say stop aloud.
I walked away with a completely new perspective on decision-making, defining success criteria, ensuring we’re aligned on whether to kill, pivot, or scale—without getting trapped by competing incentives.
Adam Attas
Staff PM, Walmart
The workshop
A Survival Metrics workshop, run on your team’s own live project, that ends with your stop, pivot, and invest calls on paper. From $3,000, online or in person, scoped to your team.
Read these first
-
Is Your Product Strategy Still Working? Three Signs It's Dead
Before you can say stop, you have to prove it's over. Three signs that hold up in a room that doesn't want to hear them.
-
Survival Metrics: How Product Teams Know When to Stop
Stop, pivot, invest, written down before the work starts. Then saying stop is just reading back what you agreed.
-
Secrecy Culture vs Privacy Culture: Why It Matters for Product Teams
Nobody's hiding anything. They just learned what's safe to say. That's the difference between privacy and secrecy.