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We Spent 18 Months Building a React App. One Customer Asked Us to Delete It

Our engineers loved the product. Our investors loved the demo. The people paying for it had a considerably less romantic opinion.

Engineering at Scale | ProdRescue By Devrim

7 min read11 hours ago

The customer meeting was supposed to last thirty minutes. We’d prepared a beautiful presentation with animated dashboards, configurable workflows, and a new AI-powered search feature that had taken six engineers almost three months to finish. Our product manager, Oliver, had rehearsed the demo twice. He was wearing a blazer, which in a software company usually means somebody is about to ask for money.

The customer was a logistics company paying us roughly $180,000 a year. Their operations director, Helen, joined the call with a notebook, a tired expression, and absolutely no interest in our animations.

Oliver spent twelve minutes demonstrating the new interface.…