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The Kill-Review Library: learn to stop a project before it sinks the quarter.

The hardest call in any project is the one to kill it. You are halfway in, you have spent real money, and every instinct says push through. Most of the time push-through is the expensive mistake. This is a library of worked midpoint reviews where the answer was kill, descope, or continue, so you can recognize which one you are looking at in your own project, before the sunk cost decides for you.

UseWork the tool now
FormatPaid case library
ForThe midpoint decision
Apply for advisory Read the manual it comes from
Worked midpoint reviews: kill, descope, or continue.

Why you need it

Sunk cost is the worst project manager you have ever hired, and it works for free.

The Kill-Review Library is a collection of worked midpoint reviews, each one showing a project at the halfway mark and the call that followed: kill it, cut it back, or push on. You read them to calibrate the hardest judgment in project work, the one your own money makes you bad at, so you can make the call cleanly when it is your project on the table.

The test-of-done tells you when a project is finished. The kill review tells you when to stop one that will never get there.

Halfway through, with budget already spent, every founder leans the same way: keep going, we are almost there. Often you are not almost there, and "almost there" is the sound sunk cost makes. The good operators are not the ones who never back the wrong project. They are the ones who kill it at the midpoint instead of the deadline. This library shows you what that decision actually looks like across enough cases that you start to recognize your own.

What is inside

Each case follows the same four-part shape.

01 · The midpoint

Where the project stood at the review.

Budget spent, progress against the test-of-done, what had changed since kickoff. The honest snapshot, anonymized but real, with enough detail to map onto your own situation.

02 · The read

What the numbers and the room were actually saying.

The structural signal under the surface: whether the project had drifted from its brief, whether the remaining cost still beat the value, whether the team had quietly stopped believing in it.

03 · The call

Kill, descope, or continue, and why.

The decision made, including the ones where the right answer was the uncomfortable middle: cut the project back to the part that still served the brief and let the rest go.

04 · The outcome

What it cost or saved, in hindsight.

How the call aged. The kills that freed a quarter, and the rare continues that paid off, so you learn the difference instead of just learning to always quit or always push.

Who it is for

For the sponsor staring at a project they cannot tell is worth finishing.

If you are at the midpoint of a real project and the push-through instinct and the something-is-wrong instinct are fighting, this is the calibration that helps you tell which one is right. It is most useful to operators who run enough projects that the kill decision keeps recurring.

It is not an introduction to running projects. Start with the manual and the scoping pack. Come here when you have a live project and a hard midpoint call to make.

Use it now

The page is open for operators who need the tool before the work gets expensive.

Use the library shape to read the midpoint decision in front of you: kill, descope, or continue. The cases come from real reviews, so the point is pattern recognition, not another project-management theory.

The cases come from engagements where a project hit a real fork. If you have a live midpoint call and the room cannot say the hard thing clearly, apply. That is where the review becomes useful now.

What this is not

A library of other people's kills is not your kill decision.

Patterns sharpen the call. They do not make it for you.

Seeing ten midpoint reviews teaches you what kill, descope, and continue actually look like. It does not tell you which one your project is, because your project has your sunk cost, your team, and your politics attached. The library is calibration. The hardest kill, the one you cannot make because you are too invested, is exactly where an outside read with no stake earns its cost. The manual names that line, and the advisory is where it gets crossed.

Back to the manual →
Bring in a read when
  • You cannot tell whether it is "almost there" or sunk cost talking.
  • The project should probably die and no one on the team will say it.
  • The kill decision is tangled in someone's reputation, including yours.
  • The same project has survived two midpoint reviews it should not have.

When the work is live

Apply, and a live midpoint call gets read inside the engagement.
The library opens to that list first.

Application-gated. Personal reply within 48 hours. Advisory clients get the read on their own midpoint decision before the library ships.

Apply for advisory

Tier 01 Outside Read: Monthly $2,500/mo · Tier 02 from $4,500/mo · All three tiers