Landing the plane

The last 10% is the hardest.

Everyone loves the start of a project. There’s the kickoff, the fresh energy of newness, and the blank canvas of a new feature to build. There’s a particular optimism that comes with beginnings, when the team is aligned, the scope feels manageable, and the possibilities stretch out ahead of you. Starting is the fun part, which is probably why so many of us have a pile of musical instruments and unfinished side projects.

But the end is a different story. The final 10% of a project, where the work gets fiddly, the energy dips, and the finish line keeps moving, is where most projects quietly fall apart.

If starting a project is like takeoff, finishing it is like landing, demanding a completely different kind of skill and attention, and it’s where most of the risk accrues. After all, the hardest part of flying a plane is landing it.

This article is about why endings are so hard, what goes wrong when you don’t manage them deliberately, and how to land your projects well. Here’s what we’re going to cover:

• Why the final stretch of a project is psychologically and structurally harder than the beginning.

• The anti-patterns that cause projects to die quietly instead of finishing cleanly.

• Why scope creep accelerates at the worst possible moment, and how to protect against it.

• A practical playbook for landing well.

If you find this topic interesting, here are some complementary articles from the archive:

• One bottleneck at a time argues that when everything feels urgent, the counterintuitive move is to focus on the single thing that’s actually blocking progress, which is also the discipline the final stretch demands.

• The beauty of constraints makes the case that saying “not now” to good ideas is a skill rather than a compromise, and one that pays off most when scope pressure is highest.

• One list to rule them all is about the power of a single prioritised backlog, which becomes essential when you’re deciding what makes the cut and what doesn’t.

• Invert, always invert walks through the habit of asking “how could this go wrong?” before it does, a question worth asking explicitly as any project approaches the finish line.

So, let’s dig in.

Why the end is the hardest part

So why does the final stretch of a project feel so different from the beginning? Part of it is structural, since the work that remains is often the hardest of the whole project: getting it out there to customers. But a surprising amount of the difficulty is psychological, and understanding the psychology helps you manage it.

There’s a well-known adage in programming, the ninety-ninety rule, credited to Tom Cargill of Bell Labs: the first 90% of the work takes 90% of the time, and the remaining 10% takes the other 90%. Jeff Atwood wrote about living in that state in his classic post on being perpetually 90% done. I’m sure you can associate with this.

That’s because the last 10% is where you hit the edge cases, the integration problems, and the thousand small decisions that weren’t apparent when the architecture was being sketched on a whiteboard, or the initial lines of code were being written.

This certainly feels familiar to me, so I’m sure it feels familiar to you too.

The psychological side is just as powerful. Novelty is easier to desire than completion, because starting something new promises reward! And possibility! Finishing, by contrast, is structural and unglamorous, and there’s none of that novel pull in writing migration scripts or fixing the remaining glut of accessibility bugs.

Seth Godin calls this the Dip in his book of the same name: that long, unrewarding stretch between the initial excitement and the satisfaction of completion. Most people quit in the Dip not because the work is impossible, but because the emotional fuel runs out. I’m glad you can’t see my private GitHub projects.

Then there’s the planning fallacy, coined by Kahneman and Tversky and popularised in Thinking, Fast and Slow: we systematically underestimate how long tasks will take, especially tasks we haven’t done before. This then hits hardest at the end of projects, because the remaining work is precisely the kind that’s challenging to estimate (“what iterations will customers need to make this great?”)

Additionally, integrations, testing, deployment, and documentation are the tasks that expand to fill whatever time you thought you had, and then some…

Research by Diwas KC, Bradley Staats, Maryam Kouchaki and Francesca Gino found that when workload rises, people gravitate towards easier tasks to maintain a sense of progress. This is completion bias, and it maps directly to the final stretch: when pressure builds, your team will instinctively reach for minor UI tweaks and documentation fixes rather than tackling the hardest parts of the work that stand between them and shipping.

You might expect the “goal gradient” effect to help here. Research by Kivetz, Urminsky, and Zheng shows that effort naturally accelerates as you approach a goal. But, however, the goal gradient only works when the finish line is visible and stable. In software, the finish line keeps moving and moving, and that’s the problem!

The quiet death

Let’s invert the question to garner more insight. Instead of asking what a good ending looks like, consider what happens when a project never officially ends at all.

You’ll have all experienced the project that was “almost done” three months ago, where the team mentally moved on but nobody formally closed the book. Telltale signs: the Linear board still has tickets in it, nobody’s looked at them in weeks, and there was no retrospective, no celebration, no learning captured, and rather than failing spectacularly, it just faded away into the oubliette.

This is the quiet death, and it’s far more common than outright failure. Think about the project your team spent months on that got to about 90% before, say, a reorg shifted priorities and you didn’t touch it again.

Nobody makes an explicit decision to stop a project, after all: people get absorbed into other work, the remaining tickets sit untouched, and a few months later someone quietly archives the board. All that effort, all those decisions and trade-offs, and nothing shipped, and the worst part is that often nobody even notices!

The reason quiet deaths are so insidious is that “95% done” is the most expensive state a project can be in: you’ve made the maximum investment but delivered zero value.

Or worse, something partially shipped, enough to create maintenance burden but not enough to deliver the promised outcome.

The organisational cost compounds over time. When projects routinely fade instead of finishing, trust erodes between engineers and leadership. The next time you kick off something ambitious, your team starts with scepticism rather than excitement.

Interestingly, the Zeigarnik effect describes how unfinished tasks occupy mental bandwidth: your brain keeps returning to incomplete work, creating a low-grade cognitive load, which gives yet another reason to finish stuff: it helps you concentrate better on the next thing.

What makes the lack of landing projects worse is that when “almost done” drags on long enough, the tension for getting it done dissipates. The project becomes background noise, neither finished nor actively worked on, consuming mental space without the urgency that might push it across the line.

The one more thing trap

If the quiet death is what happens when nobody’s paying attention, the “one more thing” trap is what happens when everyone starts paying attention at exactly the wrong moment.

For months, stakeholders were vaguely aware your team was building something. They attended the occasional update meeting, nodded along, and went back to their own priorities. But now the project is visible, there’s a working demo, and suddenly everyone has opinions.

“Can we add dark mode before launch?” “What about accessibility for the new flow?” “I just saw what the competitor shipped last week, could we match that?” Each request sounds reasonable in isolation, each one is small, and each one pushes the finish line a little further away.

Jon Acuff, in his book Finish, calls these “noble obstacles”: things that look like smart preparation, feel responsible, yet masquerade as doing things right.

And it isn’t just stakeholders who give us these requirements; we do it too! “We should refactor this module before we ship” is a noble obstacle, and “let’s speed this endpoint up a little more so the P95 is green” is another.

They’re hard to argue against because they sound good, and that’s precisely what makes them dangerous.

In this phase, protecting scope becomes your primary job as a leader. This is where the beauty of constraints applies most directly: the discipline to say “not now” to genuinely good ideas is what separates projects that ship from projects that expand forever.

Joel Spolsky (again) put it memorably. “A 50%-good solution that people actually have solves more problems and survives longer than a 99% solution that nobody has because it’s in your lab, where you’re endlessly polishing the damn thing.”

The distinction between “done” and “done enough” is one of the most important judgements an engineer makes, and it’s one you’ll need to make repeatedly in the final stretch. “Done enough” means shipping, not settling.

Memories of shipping

So far, we’ve covered why endings are hard and what goes wrong. How a project ends does more than close out the deliverable, because it sets how your team feels about the next hard thing.

Daniel Kahneman’s research on the peak-end rule shows that people judge experiences primarily by two moments: the peak (the most intense point) and the end. “Duration neglect” means that how long something took matters far less than you’d expect, since you only remember those previous two parts.

A six-month project that ends in chaos will be remembered negatively, regardless of how smooth the middle was, while one that ends cleanly, with celebration and reflection, will be remembered positively.

This has direct implications for your team. The way a project ends shapes how they feel about taking on the next hard thing. If their last experience ended with a death march, ever-expanding scope and no acknowledgement, they’ll approach the next project with dread, but if it ended with a clean landing and recognition of their effort, they’ll approach it with confidence.

For senior leaders, the argument is strategic. How your projects end feeds directly into retention, morale, and how ambitious your team is willing to be. This is about building an organisational culture where finishing is valued, expected, and celebrated. How do you celebrate things shipping?

Teams that keep experiencing bad endings will stop putting their hands up for the most challenging future projects, and you end up paying that debt forever.

Landing well

So what does it look like to land a project well? The leader’s role in the final stretch is fundamentally different from the rest of the project, and recognising that shift is the first step.

During the middle of a project, your job is often to create space: remove blockers, shield the team from distractions, and get in the details and execute.

During the final stretch, your role shifts towards tighter involvement. The approach phase calls for more active steering, more frequent check-ins, and more aggressive prioritisation, and none of that is the same thing as micromanagement.

Here’s what it looks like in practice to end well:

• Increase your cadence. If you were doing weekly check-ins, move to twice a week or daily, because the final stretch moves faster, surprises arrive more frequently, and you need to be close enough to the work to spot problems before they compound.

• Protect scope ruthlessly. Every new request gets the same answer: “That’s a great idea for v2.” Maintain a single, prioritised list of what’s left (as described in One list to rule them all), and resist the temptation to add to it. Your team needs to see the finish line getting closer, not further away.

• Overcommunicate with stakeholders. In the final stretch, stakeholders need more updates, not fewer. Silence breeds anxiety, and anxious stakeholders show up with last-minute requests, so a brief daily update (”here’s where we are, here’s what’s left, here’s when we expect to ship”) is cheap insurance against scope creep.

• Favour systems over heroics. A late-night push might feel like the only option, but it’s almost always a sign that something went wrong or was forgotten about upstream. Build a checklist for the final stretch (what needs to happen before shipping, in what order, and who owns each item) to bring structure. Checklists aren’t glamorous, but they are far more reliable than adrenaline.

• Shield the team from new requests. You are the buffer between your team and the rest of the organisation. Every “quick question” and “small ask” that reaches your team in the final days is a potential derailment, so take those hits yourself. When a late requirement genuinely is non-negotiable, don’t just absorb it: trade something else out. “We can add this, but something else has to come out. Which is it?” is a more honest conversation than pretending the timeline can absorb everything.

Once you’ve shipped, the work isn’t done, because how you close the project matters as much as how you land it:

• Run a proper retrospective. Not a perfunctory one where everyone says “communication could have been better,” but a genuine reflection on what worked, what didn’t, and what you’d do differently. The insights from a project ending are some of the most valuable you’ll capture, precisely because the details are still fresh.

• Celebrate the landing. The act of marking the ending matters more than the scale of the celebration. A written retrospective that opens with what went well, individual messages naming specific contributions, or time in your next team meeting to acknowledge that the hard part is done will all do the job.

• Plan for the energy dip. Your team’s energy peaked just before shipping, so after the launch there’s a natural drop, and if you immediately pile on the next big initiative, you’ll burn people out. Give your team a beat to tackle smaller items, pay down technical debt, or simply catch their breath.

Your turn

Here are three things you can try this week:

• Audit your current projects. Look at everything your team is working on and ask: is anything stuck at “almost done”? If a project has been at 90% for more than a couple of weeks, it needs active intervention, either a push to finish or a deliberate decision to stop. The quiet death is always more expensive than a conscious call to shelve something.

• Write a pre-mortem for your next launch. Before your current project enters its final stretch, gather your team and ask: “How could this ending go badly?” You’ll surface risks you hadn’t considered, and you can build your landing checklist around mitigating them. This is inversion applied to project endings.

• Create a landing checklist. Build a reusable checklist for the final stretch of any project: scope freeze date, stakeholder communication cadence, shipping criteria, retrospective date, and celebration plan. Having this template ready means you won’t be designing your approach during the most pressured phase of the project.

Wrapping up

Starting a project is exciting, and it should be, but the start is the easy part. The end is where value is delivered, where your team’s experience of the project is cemented, and where trust with stakeholders is either built or broken.

Landing well isn’t complicated, though it does take tighter involvement, disciplined scope protection, clear communication, and the simple act of marking the ending when it comes, all things within your control.

So the next time you’re planning a project, don’t just plan the takeoff, plan the landing too. It’s genuinely the hardest part.

Until next time.