Article 5: Why Many Projects Don't Succeed: The Hidden PID Problem

Series: "Inside the Trenches of a Real Startup - The CPO’s Journey from 0 to 1"

Stop building project documents that get abandoned after week three - use this Project Initiation Document template that evolves with your project and actually survives Discovery

Whether you're a startup validating your initial vision and total addressable market or an enterprise launching a new product line, every project starts with good intentions and the need for clear direction. The Project Initiation Document captures this early alignment; it's the foundation that translates business strategy into actionable plans, secures necessary resources, and ensures everyone understands what success looks like.

At its best, a PID serves as the central communication hub that keeps complex projects on track. It answers the essential questions: What problem are we solving? Why does it matter? What will we build? How will we know we've succeeded? These documents are supposed to provide the strategic context that guides decision-making when inevitable challenges and changes arise.

But somewhere between planning and delivery, something goes wrong. The initial clarity fades, teams build in different directions, and what seemed like a sure success becomes a mediocre launch.

The Core Problem: PIDs That Don't Work

The pattern is depressingly familiar: The project got approved, but now you're three months into development and realizing you never really validated the market assumptions, the technical team is building something that doesn't align with the go-to-market strategy, and nobody can agree on whether the current scope constitutes 'done.'

Sound familiar? The problem isn't your team's execution; it's that your Project Initiation Document failed to do its job. Most PIDs get abandoned the moment discovery begins, leaving teams to recreate context, realign on priorities, and rebuild consensus repeatedly.

Teams typically move on to some kind of Product Requirements document that duplicates a portion of what is contained in the PID.

Here's what typically happens:

The Initial PID gets filed away. Once approved, the original document becomes a historical artifact. Teams create new documents for discovery findings, technical specifications, and go-to-market plans. The strategic context that justified the project gets disconnected from day-to-day decisions.

Teams build in silos. Without a living document connecting business strategy to execution details, different team members operate from different assumptions. Engineers build based on technical specs, marketers plan based on positioning documents, and product managers juggle between multiple sources of truth.

Discovery insights don't flow back. User research reveals a target persona was wrong, but the business case still reflects the original assumptions. Technical discovery shows the timeline was unrealistic, but the go-to-market plan proceeds unchanged. Each team updates their own documents without updating the foundational business rationale.

Strategic context erodes. Six months in, nobody remembers why certain decisions were made. The original market analysis feels outdated, the competitive landscape has shifted, and the team is building something that might work technically but doesn't serve the business strategy that justified the investment.

The result? Projects that launch but don't succeed. They meet technical requirements but miss business objectives. They solve problems, but not the right problems. They deliver features, but not impact.

The Solution: PIDs That Evolve

The answer isn't to create better initial documents; it's to create documents that grow and evolve with your project. Your PID should be a living document that maintains its role as the central source of truth while accommodating the inevitable changes that discovery brings.

This approach has three core principles:

Central Hub: The PID remains the single place where anyone can understand the current project strategy, scope, and rationale. Instead of abandoning it for new documents, you evolve it thoughtfully.

Structured Evolution: Rather than ad-hoc updates, the PID has a clear structure for how each section should grow during discovery. Some sections expand in-document, others link out to detailed analysis, and some get completely rewritten based on new findings.

Context Preservation: Changes are made in ways that preserve the strategic reasoning and decision history. Teams can always understand not just what they're building, but why, and how those decisions evolved.

This approach prevents the common problem where teams abandon their PID when discovery begins. Instead, the PID grows thoughtfully, maintaining its role as the project's central communication point while connecting the team to detailed documentation when needed. And this evolving central communication point works well in this AI age where a central document can be provided to the AI for more efficient outcomes.

Here is an outline I like to use for my PIDs. More sections can be added as needed based on your specific project and organizational needs, but I like to start with a fairly streamlined outline to start. Each section will be described in detail.

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