Most tech projects don't fail early; they fail at the end. The demos look good, launch approaches, and then it's "almost there" for weeks. The fix is rarely technical: it's deciding how "good" each part actually needs to be, and for whom, then cutting scope until launch is possible. I've been brought in to dig teams out of this on multiple occasions — including once turning a multi-week overrun into two days of work in a half-hour conversation.

The useful mental moves: think in vertical slices (a thin end-to-end version of everything, rather than a polished half of something); distinguish "must be good", "must exist", and "can be absent" per user type; and keep the most important thing the most important thing. If your project can't ship a meaningfully smaller version this week, that's usually a scoping problem, not an engineering one.

Key question/s: Why do most tech projects fail late rather than early? What would it take for your project to launch this week?