Will this land?

Risk matrices compare options against each other; this one anchors a single proposal in how comparable workThe 'outside view' (Kahneman & Lovallo): instead of estimating from your plan's specifics, ask how often comparable past work has landed. The unknowns you can't enumerate are already priced in. has historically landed'Landing' isn't one universal bar — each reference class names its own (ships without breaking, still in use six months later, old system retired…). The criterion line under the blurb tightens it per class. — a base rate you can adjust for what you know about your own situation.

I'm proposing . My team has , my approach is , it has external dependencies, and I'll roll it out .
My situation shifts the outlook by ±0pp — base 70% → adjusted 70%.
← failslands →0%25%50%75%100%base · 70%adjusted · 70%

Comparable work — new feature in a known product — lands about 70% of the time, anchored to DORA tiers; software-estimation surveys. My situation shifts that by ±0pp to about 70%leans toward landing. The 90% credible band is 51%–84%. The band widens as your situation drifts from the calibrated middle.

Building inside a product you know — a screen, an endpoint, a flow. Most ship; the misses tend to be scope, not catastrophe.

Counted as a winShips and is used as intended; minor scope cuts allowed

Starting from 70% new feature in a known product

LeverChoiceEffectΔpp
Team experienceSome experience±0pp
Novelty of approachAdapted pattern±0pp
External dependenciesA few±0pp
Rollout strategyPhased±0pp
Adjusted estimate 70% — base lifted by 0pp.
Base rates are calibrated reads of McKinsey/Gartner cloud-migration studies, the Standish CHAOS report, DORA change-failure benchmarks, and the Kotter/McKinsey change-management literature — not a single dataset, because none exists at this granularity.