Autopsy #7: The Kitchen Sink Demo
Cause of death: nobody could agree on what the proof of concept was supposed to prove.
This one starts differently than the others. Every autopsy so far has been performed on a demo the vendor built to look better than reality. This one is performed on a demo the customer built, with the vendor’s help, to answer everything at once, and in doing so answered nothing.
The pattern is familiar to anyone who has scoped a proof of concept. It starts small and correct. One core question, one hypothesis, one thing that either works or doesn’t: can this system handle our multi-entity intercompany billing without a workaround, yes or no. Then someone from a different department hears there’s a POC happening and asks if it can also touch their process, since they’re curious too. Then someone senior asks for the trickiest edge case in the business to be included, because if it can’t handle that, what’s the point. By the time the scoping document is final, the POC that was supposed to answer one question is now attempting to demonstrate manufacturing, procurement, three approval hierarchies, a currency conversion edge case that occurs twice a year, and an integration to a system that isn’t even part of the actual project scope.
Nobody added any single piece of this in bad faith. That’s what makes it hard to stop once it’s moving.
What actually happened
A proof of concept exists to reduce uncertainty about one specific, high-risk question as cheaply and quickly as possible. The moment it starts trying to prove ten things instead of one, several things happen at once, all of them bad.
The build time stops being proportional to the risk being retired. A POC that answers one hard question can often be built in days, because the vendor and the team can focus every hour on the thing that actually matters. A POC trying to demonstrate ten things needs ten times the configuration, ten times the test data, ten times the edge cases handled, and none of that additional effort is reducing risk proportionally, because nine of the ten things were never actually in doubt.
The result also stops being interpretable. If the multi-entity billing scenario fails, but it failed inside a build that also included four other complex configurations layered on top of each other, you cannot cleanly attribute the failure. Was it the core capability that doesn’t exist, or a configuration conflict between two features that were never meant to be tested together, or a data setup error introduced trying to support scenario six while building scenario three. A focused POC gives you a clean signal. An overloaded one gives you noise that looks like a signal.
Why it happens to smart teams
The instinct behind scope creep in a POC is almost always defensible in isolation. Nobody wants to greenlight a six or seven figure implementation based on a narrow test, only to discover eight months in that some other critical process doesn’t fit either. The fear isn’t irrational. Systems do have gaps that only show up once you look in the right corner, and a POC feels like the cheapest moment to go looking.
The trouble is that “the cheapest moment to look” and “the cheapest way to look” are different questions. Looking broadly at low depth, a checklist of yes-or-no capability questions answered through documentation review, a reference call, or a scoped demo of specific features, retires broad risk cheaply. A single POC trying to go deep on ten things at once is neither cheap nor deep. It’s the expensive way to get a shallow answer to a question that didn’t need a POC to answer in the first place.
There’s also a political dimension that’s hard to name out loud in the room. Once word gets out that a POC is happening, being excluded from it can read as a signal that your department’s concerns don’t matter. Scope grows partly because saying no to an additional scenario feels like saying no to a person, not to a line item.
The actual damage
The POC that was supposed to take two weeks takes eight. The core question, the one thing that actually justified spending POC time and budget, gets buried under nine other questions that each needed their own edge case handling, and by the time results come back, the steering committee is looking at a partial success across ten dimensions instead of a clear answer on the one dimension that mattered. Decision paralysis follows almost automatically, because a partial, ambiguous result is much harder to act on than a clean pass or fail.
Worse, the actual high-risk question, the reason the POC existed in the first place, often gets the least rigorous testing of the ten, because it was scoped first and then diluted by everything added after it. The team spends real effort proving things that were never seriously in doubt, and comparatively little effort on the one thing that was.
The fix, if this is your situation
Separate what the POC needs to prove from what people merely want to see. Write down the single question, or at most two, whose answer would actually change the buying decision. Everything else, every “while we’re in there” request, goes on a second list explicitly labeled as out of scope for this exercise, with a stated plan for how it will get answered instead, whether that’s a reference call, a documentation review, or a second, later POC once the first question is settled.
When someone pushes back and asks why their scenario isn’t included, the honest answer is the useful one: this POC is designed to answer one hard question as cleanly as possible, and adding your scenario wouldn’t make the answer more trustworthy, it would make it harder to read. That’s not a dismissal of their concern. It’s a commitment to answering it properly, later, instead of poorly, now, buried inside somebody else’s test.
A POC that tries to prove everything proves nothing cleanly. The discipline isn’t in the build. It’s in what you refuse to put in it.
The same fragmentation shows up in individual work, not just project scoping. In The Forty One Percent Problem, I look at decades of research showing that a large, stable share of professional time gets eaten by low-judgment overhead scattered across too many things at once. A POC that tries to answer ten questions has the same disease as a workday that tries to touch ten priorities. Depth loses to breadth every time.
A Tinkerers Notebook 