What Is a Zombie Project? How to Spot and Kill the Work That Won't Die

In a due-diligence engagement a while ago, I found a business spending several hundred thousand euros a year providing free consultancy to a government organisation. There was no contract worth speaking of, no pipeline behind it, no commercial rationale at all. Why was it happening? Because the CEO found the idea interesting. That was the entire business case.

In another, I found an entire second company hidden alongside the main one — a data-analytics startup quietly losing a fortune and, more damagingly, pulling the management team’s attention away from the business that actually paid the bills. This wasn’t a considered move to a new S-curve . It was teleporting to a completely different curve, for no reason anyone could articulate.

Both were zombies. And once you’ve learned to recognise them, you find them in almost every organisation you look at.

A zombie project is one that’s neither alive nor dead: it keeps consuming people, budget, and management attention while having no realistic path to the value that justified it — and yet nobody kills it. Unlike a struggling project that’s still heading somewhere, a zombie has no destination left. It shambles on under institutional momentum, sustained by sunk cost, a sponsor’s ego, or a team organised around it.

You spot a zombie the moment you can no longer draw a line from the work to an outcome — and the fastest way to force that moment is to make the spend visible. This is exactly what RoadmapOne is for: it surfaces how much squad-and-sprint capacity each initiative is actually consuming, sitting right next to the objective it’s meant to serve. When a project’s resource cost is on the same screen as its (conspicuously absent) business case, the conversation everyone has been avoiding finally has to happen. It is very hard to argue with the number of engineers pointed at a thing that is going nowhere.

Sign up (free) to surface what your zombies are really costing

What Is a Zombie Project?

A zombie project is an initiative that should have been stopped and wasn’t. It still has a budget line, still has people assigned, still appears on the roadmap — but it has no credible route to the value that justified starting it. The market moved, or the assumption was invalidated, or the sponsor lost interest, or it was never really a commercial proposition in the first place. And yet it walks.

Three distinctions sharpen the definition, because “zombie” gets used loosely:

• A zombie is undead, not disguised. This is the clean line against the watermelon project . A watermelon is reported green while it’s actually red — the failure is deception. A zombie is the opposite: everyone half-knows it’s not delivering. It’s not hidden, it’s openly limping. The failure isn’t misreporting; it’s the absence of a kill.
• A zombie is not the same as “struggling.” A project that’s behind or at-risk is still wandering toward a destination, and the right response is to help it get there. A zombie has no destination left. Telling the two apart is the whole diagnostic skill, and I’ll come to it.
• A zombie is not keeping the lights on . KTLO is legitimate, deliberate sustaining work. A zombie is investment work — capacity you’re spending in the hope of growth or transformation — that should have been cancelled or demoted to mere maintenance and wasn’t.

The damage a zombie does is almost entirely opportunity cost. The wasted budget is the small part. The real loss is the capacity — and the leadership attention — that should have been pointed at something alive. In a world where product and engineering resource is largely fungible across initiatives, every person on a zombie is a person not on the thing that would actually move the business.

The Continuum: Some Zombies Are More Undead Than Others

The single biggest mistake people make with this topic is treating “zombie” as a binary. It isn’t. Zombies sit on a continuum from “obviously dead, kill it today” to “genuinely hard call that reasonable people disagree about.” Three species cover most of what you’ll find.

The CEO Hobby Project

This is the most undead of all, and the hardest to put down — because the person who should kill it is the person who loves it. The free consultancy to the government department. The vanity data-analytics startup. The pet technology nobody asked for. These are sustained not by sunk-cost reasoning but by interest and identity: the founder finds it stimulating, or it makes them feel like a pioneer, or it’s more fun than the grind of the core business that actually generates revenue.

Hobby projects are overwhelmingly a disease of the governance vacuum. They flourish in founder-owned growth businesses where there is no board, no chair, no experienced mentor whose job is to ask the awkward question. The CEO has the authority to start whatever they like and no one with the standing to say “why?”. This is the same dynamic as an unchecked HiPPO — the highest-paid person’s opinion, with no counterweight — except that here the opinion has hardened into a whole initiative with a team and a cost base.

Sunk-Cost Drift

The second species is quieter and more democratic. No one is in love with it; it just won’t stop. A project nobody’s watching closely accumulates two years of investment, and now “we’ve spent too much to stop” becomes the argument for spending more. There’s no villain — just momentum, a team that turns up every day, and a collective reluctance to be the person who declares the last eighteen months a write-off. This is the zombie of inattention rather than ego, and it’s the one a good capacity review surfaces almost immediately, because the spend is real but the outcome it’s tagged against is hollow.

The Mature, Low-Growth Product

The third species is the genuinely hard case, and the one most articles ignore entirely. Not everything that isn’t growing is a zombie. You may have a product reaching the end of its lifecycle , or sitting in a mature, low-growth market, that still throws off real cash and real customer value. You absolutely should keep investing in it — the question is how much. The discipline is making sure the investment is commensurate with the upside.

This is where a tool like RoadmapOne earns its keep, because the honest question is brutal: in a world where engineering resource is fungible across the portfolio, would this product be better off on pure keep-the-lights-on footing, with the investment dollars redeployed somewhere with more headroom? Those are hard decisions, and they’re made harder by the fact that there’s usually a whole team organised around the product. The org structure itself becomes the life-support machine: the team exists, so the product must continue, so the team continues. It limps along not because anyone decided it should, but because nobody worked on the org to decide it shouldn’t .

And the low-growth zombie has a signature tell: the perpetual promise that the next feature will turn it around. One more release, one more capability, and the fortunes will reverse — and when they don’t, it wasn’t our fault; the market was tough, sales didn’t push it, the timing was off. This is the product version of what an old boss of mine meant when he said a bad salesperson always asks for more features while a good one sells what they already have . A product that can only be rescued by a feature it hasn’t built yet, release after release, is not being rescued. It’s being fed.

See your Run/Grow/Transform split—free sign-up

Why Zombies Survive

If zombies are so damaging, why are they everywhere? Because every force in the system pushes towards keeping them alive and almost none pushes towards killing them.

There are no kill criteria. In theory, you set explicit conditions up front — “if we haven’t hit X by Y, we stop.” In twenty years I have essentially never seen this actually exist in practice. It’s a lovely idea that dies on contact with real organisations, which means there is rarely a pre-agreed trigger that forces the question.

Sunk cost is a story we tell ourselves. The more you’ve spent, the more painful stopping feels, even though the spent money is gone either way. This is the same reasoning that makes killing anything hard, and it gets stronger with every quarter the zombie survives.

The org is organised around it. A team’s existence is a powerful argument for the continued existence of its work. Disbanding a zombie means reorganising people, which is uncomfortable, so the path of least resistance is to let it shuffle on.

And nobody owns the kill. Starting things is glamorous; stopping them is thankless. Tom Peters used to argue that every company needs a Chief Destruction Officer — someone whose actual job is to go around killing things. He was only half joking. The reason the role sounds absurd is exactly the reason zombies thrive: in most organisations, destruction is nobody’s job.

How to Spot a Zombie

The detection test is simple to state and devastating to apply: can anyone draw a straight line from this work to an actual outcome? Walk up to the initiative and ask, in order:

1. Why are we doing this? Not the inspirational version — the commercial one.
2. Where’s the business case? Is there an agreed, written view of how this turns into revenue or saved cost?
3. What milestone are we hitting? Is there evidence of progress towards the outcome, or just evidence of activity?
4. How much are we spending on it? In people and capacity, not just cash.

A zombie fails these questions not with a wrong answer but with a shrug. Nobody can quite say why, the business case has evaporated or never existed, the only milestones are output milestones (“we shipped the thing”), and — tellingly — almost nobody knows the true resource cost, because it’s spread across squads and quarters where no one has added it up.

That last point is the practical lever. The reason zombies survive scrutiny is that their cost is invisible — diffused across the org in a way that no single person feels. Make it visible and the spell breaks. When you can show, on one screen, that a no-line-to-outcome initiative is consuming three squads across four sprints while a starved growth bet next to it has one, the opportunity cost stops being abstract. This is the single most useful thing surfacing capacity allocation does: it turns a vague unease into a number people have to respond to.

How to Kill One

Here’s the honest mechanics, because the advice to “just stop low-value work” badly understates how hard it is.

In a governed company, the kill comes from the board. Not from the team, not usually from the CEO, and rarely on the first attempt. What I see, repeatedly, is that the board (or a NED, or a diligence process) forces the question, the CEO fights it for six to twelve months, and then one day it becomes simply undeniable and the thing dies. The board is the counterweight the system otherwise lacks. This is why the governance fix matters more than any clever framework: a business with a real board that’s willing to ask “where’s the line to revenue?” will eventually kill its zombies. A founder-owned business with no such check usually won’t — the zombie survives until the ownership changes, which is exactly why a private-equity transaction so often becomes the moment of reckoning.

Surfacing the spend shortens the fight. You can’t skip the six-to-twelve-month resistance entirely — egos and identities are involved — but you can compress it by making the cost undeniable earlier. The faster the true opportunity cost is on the table, the faster “undeniable” arrives.

Reframe from kill to redeploy. The mature, low-growth product rarely needs to be killed; it needs to be demoted — moved to keeping the lights on and its investment budget redeployed to something with headroom. Framing it as reallocation rather than execution makes the decision politically survivable, and it’s usually the correct answer anyway: keep the cash flowing, stop pouring growth investment into a ceiling.

The Strategic Reframe: Most of These Should Never Have Started

There’s a deeper point underneath all of this, and it’s the one I’d most want a board to internalise.

It is perfectly fine for a company to spend, say, 10% of its capacity on Transform — genuinely new bets, new curves, new businesses. But there has to be an objective, agreed view of how that work actually turns into revenue. Most of the zombies I find are Transform initiatives with no such view: speculative, long-horizon, “interesting” bets that were never underwritten by a real commercial thesis.

And in 2026, the calculus on long-horizon Transform has shifted hard. When the cost of building has collapsed but the cost of winning a customer has not, most companies should not be running Transform initiatives with a greater-than-two-year horizon at all. The speculative pioneer increasingly loses to the fast follower: far better to let the startups prove the idea, take the market-education risk, and validate the demand — and then, when it’s proven, capture the revenue by crushing them through the distribution channel you already own. Your existing customer relationships, sales motion, and brand are the assets AI hasn’t made cheap. A two-year moonshot with no line to revenue isn’t visionary; in most portfolios it’s just a zombie that hasn’t started shuffling yet.

How RoadmapOne Surfaces Zombies

Everything above comes back to one capability: making the invisible visible. RoadmapOne tags every objective by the strategic pillar it serves — Run, Grow, Transform, or your own categories — allocates it to specific squads and sprints, and then shows you, in a single analytics view, exactly what share of your capacity each pillar and each initiative is actually consuming. THIS IS WHAT BOARDS NEED to see, because it converts “I have a vague feeling that project is going nowhere” into “that initiative is consuming 14% of engineering capacity against an objective with no agreed path to revenue.” That sentence is how a zombie dies. The spreadsheet that should contain it is one nobody maintains; the analytics view that contains it by default is the difference between a conversation that happens and one that doesn’t.

It won’t override the politics — the CEO will still fight for their hobby project, and the board will still take its six to twelve months. But it puts the number on the table at the start of the fight instead of the end, and that is most of the battle.

Sign up (free) to make every initiative’s cost visible

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a zombie project?

A zombie project is an initiative that keeps consuming people, budget, and management attention while having no realistic path to the value that justified it — and that nobody kills. It’s “undead”: everyone half-knows it isn’t delivering, but institutional momentum, sunk cost, or a powerful sponsor keeps it walking. It differs from a struggling project, which is still heading toward a destination, and from legitimate maintenance work, which is a deliberate choice to sustain a product.

What causes zombie projects?

Three main causes. First, governance vacuums — founder-owned businesses with no board to ask “where’s the line to revenue?” breed CEO “hobby projects.” Second, sunk-cost reasoning — the more you’ve spent, the harder stopping feels, so you spend more. Third, organisational inertia — when a team is organised around a product, the team’s existence becomes the argument for the product’s continuation. The common thread is that almost no organisation sets, or enforces, kill criteria.

How do you kill a zombie project?

In practice, the kill almost always has to come from the board or an equivalent outside check. The pattern is consistent: the board forces the question, the CEO resists for six to twelve months, and then it becomes undeniable. You can shorten that fight by making the project’s true resource cost visible early, so the opportunity cost is on the table sooner. For mature, low-growth products, “kill” usually means “demote to keeping-the-lights-on and redeploy the investment,” not literal cancellation.

What is a hobby project?

A hobby project is a particularly stubborn species of zombie: a pet initiative, usually started by a CEO or founder, that survives because the person who should kill it is the person who loves it. It’s sustained by interest and identity rather than commercial logic. Hobby projects are most common in founder-owned growth businesses with no board or mentor holding the leader to account, and they typically don’t die until ownership changes.

What’s the difference between a zombie project and a struggling project?

A struggling project is still heading toward a real outcome — it’s behind, at-risk, or hitting obstacles, but there’s a credible destination and the right move is to help it get there. A zombie project has no destination left: the market moved, the assumption was invalidated, or it was never commercially viable, yet it continues. The diagnostic question is whether anyone can draw a straight line from the work to an actual business outcome. A struggling project can; a zombie only shrugs.

How do you spot a zombie project?

Ask four questions: why are we doing this, where’s the business case, what milestone are we hitting, and how much are we spending? A zombie fails not with a wrong answer but a shrug — no commercial rationale, no agreed business case, only output milestones (“we shipped it”), and usually no one even knows the true resource cost because it’s diffused across teams and quarters. Surfacing the total capacity an initiative consumes is the fastest way to expose it.

Conclusion

Zombie projects are one of the most reliable sources of wasted capacity in any organisation, and almost none of them die on their own. They survive because every incentive in the system favours keeping them alive: sunk cost makes stopping painful, the org organises itself around them, kill criteria don’t exist in practice, and destruction is nobody’s job. The most dangerous of all — the CEO hobby project — is protected by the very person with the power to end it.

The cure is not a clever framework. It’s governance plus visibility. A real board willing to ask “where is the line to revenue?” will eventually force the kill; making the true opportunity cost visible from the start is what shortens the inevitable fight. And the deepest fix is upstream: be ruthless about what you let start in the first place. Most long-horizon, “interesting” Transform bets with no agreed path to revenue are simply zombies that haven’t started shuffling yet — and in an era where building is cheap and distribution is everything, the disciplined move is usually to let someone else prove the idea, then win it through the channel you already own.