In April 2023, I posted an article called “The Fallacy of Deadlines,” explaining why imposed deadlines always end up delivering demise on a plate, and how you can’t keep scope, quality, and cost fixed and also impose a deadline — something has to give.
Today, in a retro, I realised that actually, you can make it all work. Yes, that’s right — the rule has a loophole. As someone rightfully asked, “We asked you to deliver the impossible, and you all complain about it, but the fact is, you somehow did it?!”
They were right — the triangle was pinned to the wall, the constraints looked impossible, yet somehow, we did deliver. But that realisation isn’t a cause for celebration. It’s a warning.
Because the loophole isn’t a process hack or a productivity breakthrough — it’s people. It’s the goodwill, commitment, and quiet sacrifice of engineers, designers, and product managers who stretched themselves to breaking point to make it happen.
On paper, it looks like success: the project shipped on time, the budget held, the stakeholders are happy. In project management tools, velocity charts climb and burndowns look perfect. But beneath that veneer, something else is happening — hours logged “off the books,” teams quietly skipping rest, parents missing bedtimes, developers pushing one more build at midnight.
And while the tools show perfect triangles, the people carrying them are breaking.
The People Cost
Research across tech and product organisations consistently shows that unsustainable pace is a silent killer of morale and performance. According to a 2021 McKinsey study, 49% of employees reported being at least somewhat burned out — and in technology roles, that number is closer to 60%. Harvard Business Review reports that burnout can reduce productivity by up to 40%, and companies with high burnout rates see 2.6x higher turnover.
Those aren’t abstract numbers — they’re the cost of “getting it done.” Every all-nighter quietly depletes trust and motivation. Every “heroic push” builds an expectation that this is just how work gets done here. And every time we say “it worked last time,” we’re really saying, “we’re willing to pay in people again.”
This is the hidden debt no finance team tracks — the goodwill debt. It doesn’t appear in Jira, but it compounds fast.
The New Baseline Problem
The most dangerous part is what happens next. Once you’ve “proven” that an impossible timeline is possible, it becomes the new baseline. Stakeholders assume the team can always “pull it off.” Future planning starts from an inflated sense of delivery speed. And even well-intentioned leaders, under pressure, point to history as precedent: “We shipped that in six weeks — why can’t we do this in five?”
This creates a ratchet effect — expectations go up, buffers disappear, and every success rewrites what “normal” means. The system rewards the very behavior that’s burning it out.
The irony is that the short-term win actually slows the organisation down in the long run. Burned-out engineers make more mistakes, velocity drops, and quality debt piles up. HR spends months recruiting to replace key talent. Onboarding and context-building slow everything further. Eventually, you’re working harder to stand still.
The Illusion of Success
As product leaders, we often measure success in delivery terms: features shipped, dates hit, milestones achieved. But those metrics tell only half the story. A team can deliver everything “on time” and still be running on fumes.
What we should be measuring is sustainability — whether a team can keep performing at that level without invisible overtime or burnout.
The irony is that the very tools designed to help us manage progress — roadmaps, velocity charts, dashboards — can hide this problem. They show efficiency, not exhaustion. It’s easy to believe things are fine when the numbers look good.
The Real Loophole
So yes — you can make the impossible happen. You can bend the triangle. But you don’t do it by breaking physics; you do it by breaking people.
And that’s not a loophole worth exploiting.
True leadership isn’t about finding ways to make the impossible possible — it’s about protecting the people who make the possible sustainable. That means calling out unrealistic timelines, being transparent about trade-offs, and tracking morale and burnout as closely as you track spend and delivery.
Because while time can be recovered, trust and talent cannot.
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