Once upon a time we felt we were doing things didn’t matter. Status updates for work no one would use. Initiatives kept alive by habit or politics. Reports pulled because “we’ve always sent them around here”. We were exhausted, yet nothing meaningful seemed to come out. To the point someone said it out loud in a retro: “We’re doing zombie work.”
We all laughed….then we went quiet. Because it was funny yet undeniably true.
The symptoms you probably recognize
Endless Work in Progress (WIP): too many initiatives, all “in progress,” none delivered.
Stakeholder theater: updates performed for things no one has asked about it in months.
Legacy obligations: recurring activities with no owner or anyone who can explain “why.”
No clean stops: initiatives lingering for quarters because stopping them is socially harder than keeping them alive.
Velocity masking value: lots of output, little impact.
That’s when some of us decided to try an attempt to stop the zombie work:
Inventory everything
We created a one-page per initiative still in the backlog:
Name, purpose, start date
Owner(s)
Last time a customer touched this
Expected outcome and metric
Cost to continue (time/people) next 90 days
What would break if we paused it for 30 days?
Define simple kill criteria (not acceptance)
We agreed on brutally clear criteria:
No current customer or business impact identified within 90 days
No person or owner who can articulate the outcome
No learning in the last 60 days (no movement, no updates on JIRA)
Duplicates or overlaps with other work
Compliance-only work
Stop Review meeting
We scheduled a Stop Review with product, engineering, design, ops relevant stakeholders (the ones we knew shared same opinion as us). The question wasn’t anymore on whether “Is this important?” It was:
What would we learn or achieve in the next 90 days if we continued?
What would we free up if we stopped now?
What’s the smallest reversible pause we can try?
Label the initiatives in plain language
Kill: stop now, archive artifacts, publish a short “why we stopped” note.
Pause: 30–60 days, explicit resume criteria, owner, and date.
Reduce: reduce scope to the smallest valuable outcome.
Keep: continue with an explicit 90-day outcome and metric.
Make it visible and social
We put the Stop List next to the roadmap and we updated both on a weekly basis. When we killed something, we posted a 3-bullet note:
What it was
What we learned
What freed up
In the first meeting alone, we killed or paused almost 1/3 of our ongoing work. It was liberating!!! The results were noticeable in the first month or so!
With fewer running initiatives, we finished things. Cycle time was trending lower and lower.
“This isn’t worth it.” By simple allowing people to say it, psychological safety went up because “no” became a respectable answer.
Stakeholder engagement increased: Counterintuitive, but true. When we shared clear reasoning and what we would do instead, people would rather see three things delivered rather than ten things forever in progress.
Work that “belonged to no one” quietly died. No one missed it
Recurring status meetings and reports for initiatives that no one cared stopped
It wasn’t all easy peasy, the hard things along the process were many:
Sometimes Zombie work had hidden protectors: Some initiatives had sponsors who hadn’t checked in for months. Bringing them into the Stop Review meeting took lots of diplomacy and data.
Sometimes it was hard to separate sunk costs from future value: “we already spent 6 months on this” is not a reason to spend more…
Killing is a skill: We learned to sunset gracefully and capture learnings, keep the documentation, and move on without blame.
What We learned
Focus is a choice
Saying no is a leadership act at every level, not just at the top.
You earn trust faster by stopping low-value work than by promising to do everything.
Zombie work doesn’t die on its own. You have to invite it to the exit door, thank it for its service, and close it behind you.
If you and your teams feel the same, try a Stop Review with a simple one-pager and a kill criteria. You might be surprised how much progress is hiding under the work you don’t need to do 🙂
