No Kill Criteria

No Kill Criteria refers to the absence of predefined conditions for stopping projects or features. When there is no clear guidance on when to shut down an effort, work tends to persist well beyond its usefulness, draining time, focus, and resources.

Background and Context

Go or kill gates are a standard component of stage-gate project management. These are predefined checkpoints used to assess whether an initiative should proceed or be terminated based on viability, cost, and strategic alignment. Without these review points, teams often continue projects out of sunk-cost bias or inertia.

This pattern is especially common in innovation efforts or exploratory roadmaps. When success criteria aren't defined up front, teams can fall into the trap of continuing “just in case,” consuming resources long after a project’s relevance has expired.

Root Causes of No Kill Criteria

This anti-pattern often results from a combination of organizational, cultural, and emotional factors. Below are several common drivers:

• Fear of signaling failure by ending a project
• Pressure to keep momentum instead of pausing for evaluation
• Lack of defined exit criteria or kill metrics in planning
• Absence of a clear review or governance structure for ongoing work

Teams benefit from surfacing these drivers early, especially in new initiatives or long-running programs.

Impact of Undefined Kill Criteria

When projects lack conditions for stopping, the downstream effects can be severe. This includes:

• Prolonged investment in non-essential or low-impact work
• Drain on team morale, budget, and focus with no measurable return
• Lost opportunity cost from not reallocating to higher-value initiatives
• Cluttered roadmaps and portfolios filled with stale or untracked work

Stopping projects at the right time is just as critical as starting them with the right intent.

Warning Signs That a Project Needs a Kill Point

The absence of kill criteria often reveals itself through repeated patterns and delays. Look for:

• Milestones that keep slipping with no strategic review
• Lack of clarity around what success looks like
• Continuation of delivery efforts despite minimal impact
• Work items that never formally close or exit the roadmap

These symptoms suggest the team is working reactively rather than with purpose.

Metrics to Detect No Kill Criteria

These metrics can help identify when projects have outlived their value and are operating without intentional boundaries:

Metric	Signal
Cycle Time	Extremely long or indefinite time to complete work suggests lack of end-state clarity.
Deployment Frequency	Stalled or irregular releases point to low momentum or unclear goals.
Sprint Rollover Rate	Recurring carryover of the same work signals indecision or delayed project decisions.

When these signals persist across projects or teams, it's often a sign that kill criteria needs to be established.

How to Prevent No Kill Criteria

Prevention requires proactive planning, cultural permission to stop work, and recurring checkpoints. Best practices include:

• Define success and exit conditions up front during planning
• Include kill gates in MVPs, discovery tracks, or strategic initiatives
• Normalize the idea that stopping is a success when learning is complete
• Tie continued funding or team allocation to measurable impact, not duration

Prevention creates a sense of discipline without punishing experimentation or failure.

How to Mitigate When Kill Criteria Are Missing

If you’ve already accumulated projects without clear endpoints, there are still ways to recover:

• Audit ongoing initiatives and identify those lacking outcome metrics
• Hold strategic checkpoints to validate continuation versus sunset
• Reframe canceled work as capacity reclaimed, not a failure
• Share case studies of stopped projects that led to valuable redirection

Introducing kill criteria midstream creates clarity and helps teams redirect energy where it matters most.