What’s the worst product horror story you’ve ever experienced? 🚨

From failed launches to nightmare bugs, we’ve all seen some wild things. What’s the worst product-building disaster you’ve witnessed firsthand? (Bonus points for a hilarious or painful lesson learned.)

I'll start.

At one of the past companies I've worked for, my team spent 8+ months building a highly-requested initiative. As we're about 2 weeks away from going into experimentation—leadership decides to change strategic direction and kill the product. 😞

This had cascading effects on morale and trust across many different team members in Product, Eng, DS, PMM, Sales, Legal, and Design. For more context, this initiative had alignment across the entire leadership and executive teams.

Although it was painful in the moment, I do believe it was the right decision. But if I had to do it again, I would have wanted to figure out how to launch a lighter version of this major initiative to not be building behind the scenes for 8+ months. Basically, we should have been more startup-y in a bigger tech company.

What's yours?