Miami Build Day is going to ask you to do something uncomfortable.
At 5:10 PM on April 17, your team will stand up in front of the room and make a public commitment about what happens to the prototype you spent the day building. The commitment will take exactly one of two forms.
The first form is shipping. You will name a date in the next 60 days, name a customer or internal owner, and commit to putting the prototype in front of them by that date. The room will hear it. The date will be remembered.
The second form is killing. You will name a date in the next two weeks, name an owner, and commit to publishing a one-page document explaining why you are killing the prototype — what you learned that made you decide it wasn't worth pursuing, what assumption turned out to be wrong, what you would do differently if you tried again. Posted internally for the firm to read.
I want to be very clear: these two outcomes are equal in standing.
A team that ships and a team that kills are both honoring the day. The only failure mode at Miami is the third option — silently shelving the work, never deciding, and letting the prototype quietly become another file in another folder no one opens. That is the outcome we are designing the day to make impossible.
The 1-pager on what you killed and why is, in many cases, more valuable to the firm than the prototype itself, because it captures learning we normally throw away.
Come ready to commit. Ship or kill — both are wins.
— Anuj