Why we'll publish the projects we stop
A lab that only shows its wins is hiding most of its work. Here's what we plan to share instead, and why.
- Published
- Topic
- Method
- By
- KodBees Labs
Most company websites show finished products. Labs that publish their research tend to show the projects that worked. Both are reasonable, and both leave out most of the work.
When we started KodBees Labs, we decided our products page would list every project we take on — including the ones we stop — with the stage it reached and the reason it ended.
Stopping is the expected outcome
Our method has four stages: Observe, Prototype, Validate, Ship. Each one asks a single question, and a project only moves on when the answer comes from what people do rather than what they say they'd do.
If that method works, most projects should stop. The problem turns out to be occasional. Or it's real but already well solved. Or the prototype makes the task a little easier, but not enough for anyone to change how they work. None of those are failures of effort. They're answers.
A lab that only shows the projects that made it through hides the part of its work that does the most to protect its time.
What a shelved project will show
When we stop a project, its entry moves to the Shelved section of our products page. It keeps everything it had while it was active:
- the hypothesis we started with,
- the questions we were trying to answer,
- the lab log, entry by entry,
- and a short, plain account of why we stopped.
We won't dress it up. "Usage faded once the novelty did" is a complete reason.
Why bother
Three reasons.
It keeps us honest. Writing down why a project stopped, in public, makes it harder to quietly move the goalposts while it's running.
It's useful to the people who helped. Anyone who gave us an hour to explain how their work gets done deserves to know what came of it.
It explains the projects that do ship. A product that leaves the lab means more when you can see what didn't.
What this isn't
This isn't a promise to publish everything. Conversations with the people we learn from stay private, and anything shared with us in confidence stays out of the notes. What we publish is our own reasoning: what we believed, what we tested, and what changed our mind.
The list is short for now. It will get longer — and if the method is working, the Shelved section will grow faster than the rest.