How You End a Project Decides Whether Anyone Takes the Next Shot

Robert Cooper, who created the Stage-Gate process, told a story at the PDMA summit in Atlanta this October about a beer launch at Guinness that, by his account, should never have happened. It failed most of its tests, and the team pushed it anyway, past the test-market results and into bars where it didn't belong. It failed in the market, too.

What happened next is the part worth remembering. The president had promised that the next failure would get an Irish wake. So when this one failed, he got in there with a shovel, dug a hole and buried it, and then they opened the bar. "They never look back," Cooper said.

In the same workshop, a facilitator described a company that had tried something similar with a different tone. They held a Dead Project Day, where people got up and talked about projects that had died. It was well-intentioned, and "every person who spoke felt miserable and it was completely disheartening to them." They stopped doing it.

Both companies were trying to make it safe to end a project. Only one of them did.

Shots after a miss

The facilitator explained why this matters with a term from sports. "Professional athletes have something that they measure called SAM, shots after a miss." After a miss, the body resists taking the next shot, and the players worth having are the ones who keep shooting anyway.

Product teams have the same reflex. If the last person who raised their hand and said "I don't think this is working" got blamed, sidelined or quietly marked as negative, the next person with the same doubt keeps it to themselves. Then the bad project runs for another two quarters, because nobody wanted to take the shot.

That's why the way you end a project matters more than it seems. Every stopped project is also a message to everyone watching about what happens to the person who says stop.

The worst ending, though, is no ending at all. In that same workshop, when the room was asked why their gates weren't working, people described how projects in their companies rarely get stopped. Instead, leadership will "wound them by taking resources away" and let them limp along. A wounded project never gets a decision, so nobody learns anything from it, and the team assigned to it spends months working on something everyone suspects is already dead. That's harder on people than any burial.

Stop as valuable as go

Huntsman Advanced Materials, which won PDMA's 2026 Outstanding Corporate Innovator award, made this explicit. Angela Cooper, who leads its global innovation portfolio, told the room that "within our business and our culture, we've now made stop just as valuable as go." Ending a project early, with customer evidence behind the decision, is treated as a success rather than a failure. And right before each stage gate, an independent readiness group reviews the project's health, which she called the most important piece of their whole process.

That combination matters. The independent check makes it more likely someone will say stop. The culture makes it safe when they do.

There's a name for the kind of failure that's worth celebrating. Members of the Industrial Research Institute define a "brilliant failure" as "a well-intended and prepared project … that does not achieve its original goal – failing because of something that was not knowable at the time, but providing incredible value to the organization through learning." The same piece describes one company that writes a formal "death certificate" for every stopped project, recording what was learned, so the project can be picked back up if circumstances change.

What leaders do in the room

The difference between Guinness and the miserable Dead Project Day was mostly what the leader did. Ceremonies don't make it safe to stop things. The person with the most power in the room does, by how they react when it happens. It doesn't have to be a shovel and an open bar. It can be as simple as thanking the person who raised the alarm, in front of the people who were afraid to.

Diageo, which owns Guinness, has a more recent and better documented example. When Guinness 0.0, its non-alcoholic stout, had to be fully recalled shortly after launch, the reaction from the top was to support the team. Mark Sandys, Diageo's chief innovation officer, told Marketing Week that then-CEO Ivan Menezes made a point of celebrating the brewers' work, and that "that very visible support … made sure that we took the breathing space to get it properly right." Guinness 0.0 went on to become a best-seller in its category.

The 3M example from the same governance workshop works on a smaller scale. Teams got a little fuzzy ball not for launching a successful product, but for every stage of a project they completed. People's cubicles slowly filled up with them, and a cubicle full of fuzzy balls marked a veteran innovator, whether or not the projects behind them had shipped.

Why stopping stings anyway

Even with good leadership, ending a project hurts, and there's a reason. Researchers Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely found that people value things they build themselves far more than identical things they didn't build, which they called the IKEA effect. In their experiments, though, the effect "dissipated" when people built something and then had to take it apart, or weren't allowed to finish it. A stopped project is exactly that: something people poured themselves into, taken apart before it was done.

I don't think you can make that feeling go away, and I wouldn't try. But you can make sure people don't confuse it with failure. One of the maxims I hold onto is that failure only happens when you give up. As long as you're learning, growing and doing better the next time, you haven't failed. A team that stopped a bad project early and learned why hasn't failed. A team that kept pushing it to avoid an awkward conversation might have.

The cheap no needs someone willing to say it

I spend a lot of my time arguing that a cheap yes leads to an expensive no, and that the best time to find out an idea is wrong is before you've built it. But a cheap no only exists if somebody is willing to say it, and people only say it in places where saying it has gone well before.

For a founder, the decision itself also has to be made in a way you can live with. There's a line I picked up as a teenager, of all places from a character named Zechs in Gundam Wing, and I still think it's true: if you make a decision while feeling peace, then even if it's the wrong decision, you won't regret it. Not reactive, not stressed, but thought through. Stopping a project from that place reads very differently to a team than stopping it in frustration.

So the next time a project ends, pay attention to what the room learns from how it ended. If the person who raised the alarm is better off for having done it, you'll hear about the next bad project early. If they aren't, you'll hear about it from the market.