Kill Criteria are predefined conditions under which a project, initiative, or investment is stopped. They are established before work begins because the willingness to abort is significantly higher during the planning phase than in the middle of execution. Without Kill Criteria, organizations tend to continue projects even when the original assumptions have long been disproven.
An innovation team might define the following Kill Criteria: If after 50 customer interviews fewer than 30 percent rate the described problem as urgent, stop. If after three months no working prototype exists, stop. If unit economics after the pilot are worse than a factor of 2 from the target value, stop. These criteria must be concrete and measurable. Vague formulations like “if it doesn’t work” lead to endless discussions about whether it really is not working.
Kill Criteria are not a sign of pessimism but of strategic discipline. They protect the organization from pouring resources into hopeless projects and create the foundation for treating failure as a normal part of the innovation process rather than as personal defeat.
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