Why Your Best Ideas End Up as Solo Projects
When you don’t explain why something matters, even people who like you walk away.
A few days ago, one of my engineers, let’s call him John, signed up for a company hackathon. He wanted to build a customer-facing product using the data we already collect. In his head, this was a clear win, and he figured the rest of the DataOps team would join him.
They didn’t.
When the event kicked off, everyone said they had other work to finish. They didn’t push back. They didn’t argue. They just moved on. Nobody had promised anything to begin with.
John ended up alone. I jumped in to help because I didn’t want him to burn a week by himself. But the real issue wasn’t workload or interest. It was the part he skipped: he never explained what he wanted to build, why it mattered, or what he needed from anyone.
This wasn’t laziness. It was the same thing I see in data teams everywhere: ideas get shared, but the reason to care never makes it out of the engineer’s head.
And when you don’t make that part clear, even people who like you will walk away.
Why This Happens to Technical People
This isn’t a personality issue. Most engineers aren’t quiet, shy, or closed off. We just grow up in an environment where the work speaks for itself, and for a long time, it does.
You fix a pipeline.
You build a model.
You ship a table.
People see the outcome and move on.
So when you bring a new idea to the team, it’s natural to think the logic will do the heavy lifting. The problem is that technical logic doesn’t land the same way outside your own head. What feels obvious to you is invisible to everyone else.
We think the logic is enough
When an engineer sees a clear improvement, we expect others to see it too. But most teammates and stakeholders don’t track the same failure modes, data gaps, or system bottlenecks. They don’t feel the pressure you feel. Without that shared pressure, your idea has no anchor.
We skip the human part
Explaining why something matters feels slow. It feels like “extra work”. So we jump straight into the build. But without the “why”, other people can’t link your idea to anything they care about. They default to what’s already on their plate.
No one teaches us how to make our work matter to others
This is the piece that hits late. You only notice it once you’re senior: the job isn’t just building things. It’s making those things clear enough that people want them. And by the time you realize that, you’ve already lost years assuming buy-in would come on its own.
What Happens When You Don’t Explain Why It Matters
When the “why” stays in your head, people don’t reject your idea. They just can’t place it. So they fall back to whatever they were already planning to do.
People only understand your idea when you make the key point explicit. If they can’t repeat it back in one sentence, you haven’t pitched it yet.
People default to their current priorities
If someone already has a sprint to finish, a DAG to update, or an outage to look at, your idea becomes optional by default. Optional work loses every time unless the value is clear.
If you want a deeper look at how to make your work feel relevant to others, I wrote about mapping data engineering work to business outcomes.
Even people who like you won’t join
This is the part that catches engineers off guard. Good relationships help with trust, not context. Liking you doesn’t tell them what you’re asking for, how much work it involves, or why it matters now.
You end up carrying the whole thing yourself
The outcome is predictable. You start alone, you stay alone, and the project becomes another solo effort that drains time and visibility. Not because the idea is weak, but because nobody knew what it meant for them.
What It Looks Like When You Explain Why It Matters
When you make the point clear, things move in a different way.
People don’t need a long pitch. They don’t need slides. They just need enough context to understand the problem you’re solving.
People see the problem you’re trying to fix
Once they understand the friction you’re targeting, they can decide if it’s relevant to them. You’re not pushing the idea. You’re surfacing a shared pain.
They can place themselves in the work
Engineers want to know what role they would play. Not in a formal sense, but in terms of effort and impact. When they can picture where they fit, they engage.
Momentum builds because clarity builds
You still drive the idea, but you’re not dragging people. They move with you because they understand the point.
This is the part nobody learns early on. You’re not giving a speech, but giving people a map.
The Fear of Looking Pushy
There’s something I see in a lot of engineers, and I saw it in myself for years: we hold back because we don’t want to look pushy.
Most of us grew up in this field as task takers. Someone hands you a ticket, a problem, a broken pipeline, and we fix it. You wait, you execute, you deliver.
You don’t tell people what to do. You don’t ask for attention. You don’t take up space.
This is the same reason a lot of engineers struggle to translate their work into executive language. It feels like “selling”, but it’s just context. You’re giving people a way to follow your idea.
So when you finally have your own idea, you feel a small internal tension. You want people to join, but you don’t want to overstep. You don’t want to look like you’re selling. You don’t want someone to think you’re chasing visibility.
Instead of being clear, you soften the pitch. Or you skip it entirely.
You assume people will connect the dots because you don’t want to be the person who “pushes”. The irony is that nobody sees your intention. What they see is silence. And silence kills momentum faster than any bad idea.
This is why early-career engineers struggle with buy-in.
Nobody tells you it’s okay to ask. Nobody tells you it’s part of the job to outline what you need and why it matters. You only learn this once you start leading projects and realize nobody will show up unless you give them a reason to.
Final Thoughts
There’s a tension many engineers feel but rarely name. When the idea is yours, you hesitate. You don’t want to overstep. You don’t want to look like you’re chasing influence. So you keep things safe and factual, and you hope people will connect the dots on their own.
That hesitation cost me years.
I loved the work (and I still do). I cared about systems, pipelines, and the craft. But I also had ideas I believed could move things forward, and I never learned how to talk about them in a way others could feel. I treated my own ideas like side quests instead of work worth rallying people around.
If you’re honest with yourself, you probably have a few of those ideas too. Things you know could help your team in 2026, but you’ve held back because it felt pushy to ask people to care.
It’s part of the job once you grow past task taking.
Moving past that task-taking mindset is a big part of growing beyond the senior level. I wrote about the skills and strategies behind that shift, because nobody tells you what changes after senior.
Nobody teaches you this early in your career. You pick it up late, after you’ve already lost momentum you didn’t need to lose. My hope is simple: you don’t spend as long as I did figuring this out the hard way.
Next week, I’ll share the system I wish I had much sooner.
Thanks for reading,
Yordan
PS: Got a minute? Share how this publication helped you. Be a champion.
Love this!