I agree with this post wholeheartedly.<p>At my company I've seen many projects fail, and a few succeed. Our most successful projects have also been the narrowest in scope. Once the project is successful, it's much easier to add on things one by one because you already have something successful.
On the other hand, our most epic failure of all time was a project that was supposed to only take a couple of months but went on for many, many months. In my opinion, the project's biggest problem was a lack of naysayers. Said project was going to have every feature ever. It was going to be Facebook, but prettier and with more features. That project was evetually killed of course, but the man hours and resources wasted on it were quite astronomical for something that, in hindsight, should have been pretty obvious that it would fail.<p>I will add that one skill I've learned is the art of saying 'later' instead of 'no'. If an idea is good but too time intensive or too low priority relative to everything else, 'later' acknowledges that and reserves the right to revisit later but still ultimately is a no, albeit less injurious to the ego of the person asking.