Decouple the Product from the Megaproject Gate
When a flagship build stalls, stop holding the investments that drive your core product hostage to it — fund the product side now and bundle only what truly must be co-located.
The New England Revolution had deferred a training facility on the assumption it would be built alongside a future downtown soccer stadium. With the stadium stuck, Kraft decoupled the decision: he separated what advances the core product (player development) from what genuinely needs the new venue (branding, fan experience), and funded the former immediately — a standalone $35M training facility — rather than letting the team's roadmap freeze behind the gated megaproject.
- The default assumption is the trap: bundling everything into the flagship build ("we'd build one in the city when we built the stadium") quietly freezes the product roadmap behind a stalled project.
- Separate product-driving spend from location-dependent spend. A training facility advances the team wherever the stadium lands; branding and fan experience genuinely need the new venue, so those can wait.
- When the megaproject slips, reverse the default and act — "we decided a year and a half ago that couldn't wait."
- Step up investment where it compounds the core product — "the soccer side of the house, we had to step up the investment in."
- Decoupling is selective, not abandonment: hold the location-gated bets for the venue — "what we try to create in the venue will be very different when we come to the city."
From the MIT Sloan SSAC 2020 panel, describing the Revolution's decision (~2018) to stop waiting on the long-delayed soccer-specific stadium and invest in player-development infrastructure directly.