I worked at a small company that was always chasing the next potential sale. Potential customer mentions feature A and all of a sudden all development shifts towards developing that feature. The vast majority of the time the potential customer never became a customer. In the meantime competition focused on their own plan of features and our product wound up with features no one ever wanted and was missing critical functionality everybody demanded.
I've had the exact same experience. Throw in a large dose of "no repeat customers" due to us prioritizing Feature A for Potential Customer B over fixing existing gaps that affected actual customers, and it was a never-ending parade of haphazardly created, bug-riddled new features that never got improved.
Made every single day a death march and a company that survives purely on the sunk cost fallacy on the part of the investors. They've already dropped $MILLIONS into building this thing, and the CEO swears that this next big deal will be what finally pushes the company into the stratosphere. As miserable as it was to work there, I'm honestly impressed they're able to keep that zombie moving.
Yup, and the requesting "customer" always convinces your CEO with the same argument: "Just add this feature, sell it to us, then it's part of your product forever and you can sell it to many other customers! We're paying for your NRE!" and CEO falls for it!
The company I worked for didn't even need that incentive just the potential to make a sale! We added features just to complete bullet points on a marketing sheet even if we never made a sale of the feature.
