Rajeev Khandelwal's mix of enterprise and investment experience offers a setting for a common growth dilemma: a pilot that never becomes a decision. The trial remains too small to justify full investment but too established to close easily. A useful pilot begins with an explicit ending, even when its commercial future is uncertain.
Choose the question being tested
A trial may investigate customer demand, operating feasibility or the cost of serving a new location. Trying to answer everything at once makes a modest result difficult to interpret. The team should know which uncertainty the experiment is designed to reduce and which questions will remain for a later stage of development.
Set boundaries that permit learning
A pilot needs enough time and resources to encounter real conditions, but a defined scope prevents gradual expansion from replacing a deliberate decision. Staff commitments, customer promises and equipment purchases should reflect that temporary status. Otherwise the institution builds obligations that make stopping feel like failure even when the evidence is useful.
Record the inconvenient observations
Teams naturally highlight evidence that supports their effort. Capturing complaints, workarounds and unexpected costs makes the trial more valuable to the eventual decision-maker. A promising result can still require a different delivery model, and an unattractive first attempt may reveal a narrower use that deserves further investigation rather than immediate abandonment.
Make the final choice visible
Expansion, redesign and closure are all legitimate outcomes when tied to the original question. The decision should explain what was learned and what happens to staff, customers and reusable assets. That discipline turns experimentation into a repeatable enterprise capability, rather than a collection of small commitments nobody quite knows how to end.
