What a Pregnancy Test Mix Up Taught Me About Why Projects Fail (Before They Even Start)

Last Christmas, I sent a photo of a small test strip with two lines to my best friend, accompanied only by a series of exclamation marks. She instantly replied, “OMG, you’re pregnant!!!???” But it wasn’t a pregnancy test—it was a positive COVID test. My three kids weren’t getting a surprise sibling; they were getting a holiday stuck at home.

We laughed it off, but it perfectly illustrated what happens at the start of so many projects. Here were two people, speaking a common language, with a deep personal and professional rapport—yet interpreting the same piece of information in completely different ways. Had I not clarified, my friend would’ve continued offering baby advice when what I needed was someone to commiserate about quarantine.

In a project context, similar misunderstandings happen all the time. Left unchecked, they lead to wasted resources, misdirected efforts, and a general sense of frustration among team members. Let’s explore why this happens and how misalignment can derail a project long before it has a chance to succeed.

The Problem with Early Misalignment

At the beginning of any project, everyone is typically energized and ready to go, thinking they’re on the same page. But being on the same page doesn’t mean everyone’s reading the same book. A team can have high intent and still interpret the project’s goals in very different ways.

Take the example of my COVID test. The test strip and a pregnancy test look remarkably similar—a fact that caused the initial misalignment between my friend and me. The same thing happens in projects when there’s a superficial agreement on the surface, but underneath, people have very different ideas about what success looks like.

For instance, one person might see a project as an opportunity to explore new technologies, while another sees it as a chance to enter a new market. Both goals are valid, but if they aren’t aligned, people start pulling in different directions. This doesn’t just create inefficiency—it’s a recipe for burnout and frustration.

The Cost of Misalignment

When people work under different assumptions, it’s not just time that gets wasted—it’s the emotional and intellectual energy of your team. Every time someone spends days or weeks on a solution that doesn’t match what the team needed, they lose confidence and motivation. Eventually, they check out.

If my friend had continued believing I was pregnant, she’d be giving advice on baby clothes and maternity leave—helpful, but completely irrelevant. In a project, this is like stakeholders pushing solutions for the wrong problem, designers building unwanted features, and engineers creating tools no one will use. This is how misalignment leads to project fatigue and kills momentum.

What Does True Alignment Look Like?

Achieving alignment isn’t just about getting everyone into a room and agreeing on a project scope or deliverables. True alignment means everyone is clear and committed to the challenge, and it’s the right (most important) one to solve.

This can take many forms—identifying a problem to solve, an opportunity to capture, or a market to enter. We often refer to this as the ‘challenge,’ and it’s crucial to go through a robust process to ensure it’s also the right challenge. Design thinking frameworks can be extremely helpful here: Is it solving a genuine user problem? Is it adding value in a new or novel way? Are users asking for it?

To achieve alignment, it’s not enough to just talk it through. When you default to typical meeting formats, often the loudest or most senior person’s idea progresses. You need specific and structured collaboration techniques to ensure everyone’s viewpoints and assumptions are surfaced and understood—and, importantly, that you are designing with the user in mind.

This might sound straightforward, but in practice, it requires preparation, organization, and structuring your early sessions to avoid the “enemies of innovation” that can creep in and slow things down before you even get started.

Pro Tip: Starting with alignment on the challenge has the added benefit of avoiding premature “solutioning.” Jumping to solutions too fast skips over critical steps to explore the challenge and its dimensions, which often leads to mediocre ideas. You need the challenge clearly stated to bring focus to solutioning.

Who Needs to Be Aligned?

Alignment isn’t just for the project team—it’s about getting buy-in from decision-makers, stakeholders, and other key players. Often, we see project teams aligned, but not the leaders, or vice versa. This misalignment can be deadly to project success.

Socializing and testing the challenge with all relevant parties before you invest time and energy safeguards your efforts and protects your project from costly pivots or delays.

Why Alignment is Not a One-and-Done Exercise

Alignment isn’t something you achieve once and then forget about. As new data comes in and priorities shift, it’s crucial to build in regular alignment checkpoints throughout the project lifecycle. Without these, small misunderstandings can grow into massive issues down the line.

Tools and Strategies for Achieving Early Alignment

One of the best tools for ensuring early alignment is a “project scoping” exercise. It’s a simple yet powerful method where every team member articulates, in their own words, what they believe the project is about and what success looks like. By capturing these individual perspectives and sharing them openly, you can quickly spot areas of divergence - and create alignment.

Another effective strategy is to use a Design Sprint’s Challenge Map. It helps teams break down the core challenge into components and get everyone aligned on which aspects to tackle first.

The key is to have a shared language and set of tools everyone can use to express their viewpoints and make decisions.

Take Action

Three things you can do to create strong alignment on your next project:

1. Conduct a “project scoping” session with your team to articulate the challenge from multiple perspectives.
2. Create a Challenge Map to break down the problem and prioritize focus areas.
3. Schedule regular alignment checkpoints to ensure shared understanding throughout the project.

Final Thoughts

Alignment at the beginning of your product design or innovation project is critical because it sets the foundation for everything that follows. Without it, even the most talented teams can end up solving the wrong problems and just spinning their wheels.

So, the next time you kick off a project, take a moment to ensure everyone’s not just nodding along, but truly reading from the same book. It might save you a lot of time, effort, and laughter—though maybe not the kind you get from mistaken pregnancy announcements!

And for step-by-step guidance on using alignment tools and structured collaboration, check out The Innovator’s Toolkit.