Satire
The Proof of Concept That Ran for Eighteen Months
It was always almost production-ready. Every sprint.
The PoC was scoped for six weeks. It worked. Leadership was excited. The team kept going.
That was eighteen months ago.
What Actually Happens
Six weeks became a quarter because someone wanted one more feature before the stakeholder demo. The demo went well, so it became two more features before the client demo. The client demo generated a compliance question that triggered a security review. The security review identified three findings. Fixing the findings required architectural changes. The architectural changes were scoped and then rescoped. The original architect left the company. Someone new spent two months understanding the codebase before any decision could be made.
The PoC is now described in internal presentations as "almost production-ready."
The problem it was built to solve has since been addressed by a vendor product the company licensed for an unrelated reason.
“A PoC without a defined exit condition is just a product with no SLA and no on-call rotation.”
DivineForge Advisory
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Let's talk architecture →How a Builder Should Respond
You define the exit condition before the PoC starts — not what you will build, but what outcome will trigger the decision to ship it or kill it. If the PoC meets those criteria, you escalate the productionisation decision immediately. If it doesn't, you kill it. A PoC that is neither shipped nor killed is a liability with a commit history and an implied maintenance burden nobody agreed to. When scope starts expanding, you name what the PoC is becoming and ask explicitly whether that is the intention. Someone has to say the word "product" out loud before it becomes one by accident.
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