Big projects are an illusion of progress until the very end, when you discover that ninety percent of the work was actually only seventy percent done. The remedy is to break every project into units of work that can each be finished, end to end, in a week or less. Small enough to ship, big enough to matter.
What counts as a unit
A unit of work has a clear definition of done, a single owner, and a delivery surface. "Improve onboarding" is not a unit; "ship the first-run welcome screen for new accounts" is. The test is whether the unit, when finished, produces something a user could see and a teammate could review.
Why this changes execution
Units make progress visible at a weekly cadence instead of a quarterly one. They make bottlenecks impossible to hide, because the unit is either finished or it is not. They give people a sense of completion every week, which compounds into much higher sustained throughput than the big-batch alternative.
The discipline of splitting
The hardest part is splitting work into units without losing coherence. Practise this; it is the leverage point. A team that splits well moves four times faster than a team with the same skills but worse splits.