What shipped instead

At the end of a long project I wrote a short document nobody asked for: the eleven things we planned, the six that shipped, and an honest line on each of the five that did not. It took an afternoon and it has been read more than anything else I produced that year.

Why the dead ones matter

A shipped feature tells you what the team could do. An abandoned one tells you what the team believed in January and stopped believing by May, which is far more useful, because that belief is still shaping the next plan unless someone writes it down.

Of our five, exactly one was dropped for time. The other four were dropped because the reason for building them stopped being true, and in three of those cases nobody noticed the reason had changed until we asked why the work kept getting deferred.

Work does not usually get cancelled. It gets deprioritised eleven times in a row, which is the same outcome with nobody accountable for the decision.

The format

One line per item, three columns, no narrative.

• What we planned, in the words we used at the time — not a tidied-up version.
• What happened: shipped, cut, or still deferred.
• The actual reason, which is almost never the reason given in the standup.

The third column is the only hard one, and it is the only one worth having. Writing it requires somebody to say out loud that the premise was wrong, which is much easier in a document than in a meeting.

What it changed

The next plan had seven items instead of eleven, and we shipped six of them. I would like to claim better estimation. It was mostly that four of the eleven had been in the plan because they were in the last plan, and the document made that visible for the first time.