By the end of the project, we had done more than we probably needed to. Honestly, _far_ more than we needed to. The requirement had come down to build “Service X”, and the team rallied and pulled it off. But, in hindsight, I think we might have been able to deliver sooner – if I had put more effort into clarifying what success looked like for our stakeholders, and been more ruthless about stripping down the service to the bare essentials to meet that yardstick. In a way, it is like that part of The Martian (a great book and a good movie) where the main character, marooned astronaut Mark…