// track 08 · 8 lessons · ~39 min
What Goes Wrong.
Classic mistakes & antipatterns.
How software / project work fails — McConnell-school. McConnell's 36 classic mistakes (people / process / product / technology), the hero / rescue / death-march antipatterns, scope creep recognition + recovery, schedule chicken across teams, communication breakdowns + the meeting-after-the-meeting tell, CMMI maturity levels for context, blameless project autopsies, and the discipline of killing a project when sunk-cost reasoning would have you continue.
- 16 min08.01
The classic mistakes
McConnell's 36 ways your project dies — grouped by where they come from.
- 5 min08.02
PM antipatterns — the hero, the rescue, the death march
Patterns that look like leadership but corrode the team.
- 5 min08.03
Scope creep — recognizing and recovering
When a series of small yeses becomes a missed deadline.
- 4 min08.04
Schedule chicken — when everyone says "on track"
Mutual delusion until the deadline gets close enough to break the silence.
- 4 min08.05
Communication breakdowns — the meeting after the meeting
When the real conversation happens in DMs, the project is in trouble.
- 5 min08.06
Maturity models — CMMI levels
Five levels from "chaotic" to "continuously improving".
- 5 min08.07
The autopsy — running a postmortem on a failed project
Blameless. Specific. Actionable. Read by future teams.
- 5 min08.08
When to kill a project
Sunk cost, escalation of commitment, and the discipline of stopping.
// canonical reading for this track
Beyond what we wrote.
These are the primary sources our lessons draw from. If you want to go deep on this track, start here.
// put it into practice
Reading is half the work.
The simulator drops you into real PM scenarios so the concepts from these lessons stop being abstract.