Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones starts with a simple test: does this make the work more decidable, or does it only make the work easier to describe? Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: in product strategy, teams often mistake fluency for progress. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: they can explain the issue, name the stakeholders, and produce a tidy artifact while the actual product choice remains untouched.
Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones matters because operating systems decay when decisions stay implied. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: the company keeps moving, but each team carries a different version of the truth. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: one group thinks the bet is strategic. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: another treats it as optional. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: a third waits for a signal that nobody has agreed to produce. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: the surface looks aligned until execution exposes the disagreement.
Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones is the part of the series that sets the review standard so the team can learn without pretending every bet deserves more time. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: the post should therefore leave the reader with something more useful than a principle. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: it should leave a sharper question, a better artifact, and a way to inspect whether the work changed.
Where the work breaks
Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones breaks when the team keeps the conversation abstract. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: abstract language lets everyone nod because nobody has to give anything up. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: a real decision has a cost. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: it changes priority, sequence, ownership, scope, customer contact, or follow-through. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: if none of those things changes, the team may have had a good conversation, but it has not changed the operating system.
Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones also breaks when teams use process as a substitute for judgment. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: a meeting can collect updates without creating insight. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: a memo can summarize context without recommending a choice. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: a dashboard can show movement without showing whether the movement matters. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: the repair is not more ceremony. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: the repair is a clearer relationship between evidence and action.
Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones has another failure mode: people protect optionality until the decision window closes. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: optionality feels responsible because it avoids premature commitment. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: past a certain point, though, optionality becomes a tax. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: teams keep weak work alive, delay learning, spread attention thin, and make every downstream handoff harder.
What good looks like
Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones is healthy when a team can say what changed after the conversation. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: the change might be small: a narrower customer segment, a stopped feature, a clearer launch owner, a better research question, a different account plan, or a new review date. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: small changes count when they remove ambiguity and create forward motion.
Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones should make disagreement more useful. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: good disagreement is not noise. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: it is information about assumptions, risk, incentives, and evidence quality. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: the operating move is to capture the disagreement in a form the team can test. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: if the disagreement cannot be tested, it should at least be named as a judgment call instead of hidden as consensus.
Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones should also protect the team from false completeness. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: complete-looking artifacts can still avoid the most important question. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: the test is whether a new person could read the artifact and understand the decision, the evidence, the tradeoff, the owner, and the next inspection point without reconstructing the whole history.
The useful artifact
Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones needs an artifact that is small enough to survive normal work. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: a useful artifact has five parts: the decision, the evidence, the tradeoff, the owner, and the review trigger. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: anything beyond that should earn its place.
Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones should name the decision in plain language. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: if the decision is actually three decisions, split it. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: if the decision has already been made, say that and use the artifact to clarify execution. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: if the decision is still open, make the options visible enough that people can argue about the real choice.
Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones should treat evidence with respect without worshiping it. Evidence has shape. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: a customer quote, usage trend, sales objection, churn pattern, or support signal can matter a lot, but each proves a different thing. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: the artifact should say what the evidence supports, what it does not support, and what would be strong enough to change the next move.
Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones should make the tradeoff impossible to miss. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: tradeoff language is the difference between a strategy document and an aspiration document. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: the team should know what receives less capacity, what waits, what gets cut, what risk is accepted, and which stakeholder will feel the cost.
How to inspect it
Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones can be inspected with four questions. What are we choosing? What are we refusing? Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: what evidence would change our mind? Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: what happens before the next review? Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: if a team cannot answer those questions, the work is not yet ready for more process. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: it needs clearer judgment.
Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones should show up in the calendar. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: if the decision matters, it deserves a checkpoint. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: that checkpoint does not need to be heavy. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: it needs a defined signal, a real owner, and permission to change course. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: without that, the team will keep carrying the decision as background anxiety.
Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones should reduce the need for executive translation. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: a senior leader should be able to inspect the work without redoing the thinking. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: if the leader has to infer the customer, rebuild the evidence, guess the tradeoff, or identify the owner, the artifact is not doing enough operating work.
Field test
Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones can be tested on one live piece of work this week. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: pick something already consuming attention. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: rewrite it as a decision, not a status update. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: name the owner, the evidence, the tradeoff, and the review trigger. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: then ask what changed because the artifact exists.
Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones passes the test when the next action becomes more specific. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: the next action may be a customer call, a killed initiative, a narrower scope, a pricing review, a product bet, a launch decision, or a management conversation. Kill Criteria and Learning Milestones: the important part is that the work leaves the realm of explanation and re-enters contact with reality.
Evidence note: This is an operator-judgment essay grounded in Antoine's local source pack for Product Strategy That Actually Makes Choices and adjacent series context, including https://www.antoinebuteau.com/gtm-strategy-series-index/.
This is part 6 of 10 in Product Strategy That Actually Makes Choices.