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Why Kill Rules save focus, motivation, and your teams sanity

Most teams don’t suffer from a lack of ideas. They suffer from a lack of endings.

New things get started constantly. New features, initiatives, “strategic bets.” Everyone is busy. The backlog looks impressive. The roadmap is full. If you’re presenting to a steering group or a resource allocation committee, you can always point at a long list and say: Look, we’re doing a lot. We’re relevant.

And that’s the trap.

Because activity is not the same thing as value. And a backlog is not proof of impact but often just proof that nobody is willing to kill anything.

The moment a team, a function, an area, whatever, starts hesitating on the value they produce, you feel the tension immediately. People get nervous. Not always consciously but it’s there. If we look weak we lose budget, headcount, access to the “important” initiatives and leverage in salary talks. We lose our seat at the table.

So the organisation does what humans do under threat: it protects itself.

And one of the most effective ways to protect yourself in a big system is to stay busy on paper.

That’s why this topic matters. Not because “Kill Rules” sound edgy. But because the ability to stop things cleanly, early, and without drama is one of the strongest signals of organisational maturity I’ve ever seen.

The real reason decisions get worse over time

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most decisions don’t fail because the original call was stupid. They fail because the decision was never fully made.

It was started. It was funded. It was staffed. It was built. But nobody ever nailed down:

• what success would look like in reality
• when we’d expect to see it
• and what we would do if we didn’t

So when results come in and they’re underwhelming, the conversation turns emotional. Not because people are irrational but because the initiative has quietly become part of the organisation’s identity. It represents innovation, ambition, differentiation, competence. Killing it feels like killing a story about ourselves.

I’ve been right in the middle of that.

The lockscreen example: the decision was easy — the discussion was the mess

When I worked on lockscreen in telecom, we had a feature that made the phone unlock itself automatically in a certain scenario. Technically complex. More moving part, maintenance and responsibility over time.

We looked at usage.

0.48%.

Less than half a percent of users ever used it.

For me, that’s not even a debate. It’s not core functionality. It’s not earning its complexity ort paying its rent. So I made the call: this should be depricated.

And then I got a lot of shit for it.

Not because the numbers were unclear. They weren’t. The discussion wasn’t about the data or facts. It was about everything else.

“Can you really decide to remove something from our feature set?”
“Have we talked enough to the market?”
“Do we even have a process for removing features?”
“Marketing hasn’t launched it properly yet. maybe they will”
“This is innovation that differentiates us.”
“Competitors have it / don’t have it.”

A massive, emotional discussion. And what made it so draining wasn’t that people had opinionsbut none of those opinions had ever been turned into a shared strategy with shared criteria.

If the feature was meant to be differentiation, then we should have decided up front what that would mean in practice:

• What behaviour should change?
• What campaign would ship?
• What sales narrative would use it?
• What adoption would count as “real”?
• How long do we give it to show signs of life?

None of that existed. It was loose. Symbolic. A story.

So when I killed the feature based on reality, what I was really doing was colliding with an unspoken narrative.

That’s where Kill Rules come in, not as a “tool,” but as a way of moving these fights to the beginning, where they belong.

What Kill Rules actually are without the theatre

A Kill Rule is a decision you make before you build something, about the conditions under which you will stop.

That’s it.

Not a threat or a punishment. Not “being negative.” It’s a pre-commitment to reality.

It forces the organisation to answer three questions while everyone is still excited and optimistic, i.e. the moment when you can still be honest:

1. What are we trying to prove?
2. What would count as evidence?
3. If we don’t see that evidence by a certain point, what happens next?

If you can’t answer those questions, you’re not making a decision. You’re starting a hope project.

Why Kill Rules protect motivation instead of killing it

People don’t lose motivation because something might be stopped.

People lose motivation when they work on something for months, sense it’s not landing, and then get dragged into endless justification cycles where the goalposts move and the truth gets negotiated.

That’s demoralising.

Kill Rules, done properly, make work feel clean:

• We start.
• We test.
• We look at reality.
• We either scale it or we stop it.
• And either way, we move forward.

The motivation comes from the fact that effort has a shape. A beginning, a point of evaluation, and an ending.

Endless ambiguity is what drains teams. Not clarity.

What makes a good Kill Rule

A good Kill Rule is boring, specific, hard to argue with and slightly uncomfortable because it forces you to be honest about what you expect.

A bad Kill Rule is fluffy:
“We’ll evaluate later.”
“We’ll see how it goes.”
“We’ll monitor adoption.”
“We think marketing will push it.”

That’s not a rule. That’s avoidance.

A good Kill Rule ties together four things:

Purpose. Evidence. Time. Consequence.

And the key is: the rule has to match the real reason you’re building the thing.

If the reason is user value, measure user value.
If the reason is differentiation, measure differentiation in an observable way.
If the reason is internal efficiency, measure the operational effect.

Otherwise you’ll be stuck in the exact debate I had: “It’s innovative!” versus “Nobody uses it.”

How to introduce Kill Rules without triggering a civil war

You don’t introduce Kill Rules by sending a memo.

You introduce them by changing how work starts.

The easiest way is to make one habit non-negotiable: nothing gets built without a stop condition.

Not because you’re harsh but because you respect everyone’s time.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

Start by naming what the initiative really is

Before anyone writes code or books workshops, force a simple classification:

• Is this core user value?
• Is it a differentiation bet?
• Is it a learning experiment?
• Is it operational improvement?

If a group can’t agree on that, don’t start as you’re not aligned yet.

Turn “soft goals” into observable commitments

This is where most organisations cheat.

“Innovation” and “branding” are not unmeasurable. They’re just often used as fog.

If you believe marketing is the lever, then marketing has to commit to something concrete:

• a campaign shipped by a date
• a positioning statement used externally
• a sales deck updated and rolled out
• an announcement, a partner narrative, something tangible

If those actions don’t happen, you don’t get to blame “low adoption.” You’ve learned that the organisation didn’t actually back the bet.

And that’s valuable information too.

Write the rule in one sentence

A good Kill Rule fits in one breath:

“If X doesn’t happen by Y, we will do Z.”

Not five KPIs or a philosophy. One clean sentence.

Examples:

• Feature adoption rule:
  If fewer than 1% of active users use this feature twice within 30 days of release, we deprecate it and remove it from the next major version.
• Differentiation rule (the one your lockscreen case should have had):
  If marketing does not ship a campaign using this feature within 90 days, and adoption stays below 1%, we remove it and stop carrying the maintenance cost.
• Internal efficiency rule:
  If this change does not reduce lead time or support load by an agreed threshold within one quarter, we roll it back.

Notice what these do: they remove room for emotional negotiation later.

Make leadership sign up to the rule

This is the real make-or-break point.

Kill Rules only work if leadership treats them as real. If leaders rescue pet initiatives in hindsight, everyone learns the same lesson: this is theatre.

And then the next time someone tries to kill something rationally, they’ll hesitate because they know they’ll get punished for being honest.

If you want this to scale, leadership has to protect the people who make the call, not punish them.

The punchline: Kill Rules don’t kill ideas but kill self-deception

What happened in my lockscreen example wasn’t a debate about a feature.

It was a debate about identity. About whether we were allowed to admit that something built for innovation didn’t land. About whether removing it would look like failure. About whether “the market” might secretly love it if only we told the story better.

That’s a human reaction. I get it.

But organisations that can’t face reality early pay for it later in complexity, in maintenance, in morale, and in credibility.

So here’s the deal, said plainly:

If something matters enough to build, it matters enough to define what would make it worth keeping.

Write the ending while you’re still excited. That’s when you’re most likely to be honest. And honesty, more than optimism, is what makes decisions better over time.

#DecisionMaking #ProductLeadership #ExecutiveLeadership #Strategy #OrganizationalDesign #KillRules