“projects in progress don't do anything for your business they only start to do something for your business when they go out the door so if you have big projects kind of like chunking them up into milestones so you ship things incrementally and start to slowly test assumptions goes a long way”

Projects In Progress Don't Move The Needle — Only Shipped Features Do

Dan's core product management insight after years scaling Codeacademy: the feeling of being busy — full project tracker, multiple things in parallel — is completely decoupled from business results. A backlog of in-progress work produces zero revenue until it ships. The remedy is aggressive milestone chunking so that something goes out the door continuously, test assumptions accumulate, and the team gets signal instead of just staying busy.