>But more often companies, orgs, or teams dying has to do with engineering management in my experience.
Nothing can 10X sink a product faster than bad engineering management.
I once joined an established Enterprise software company where leadership had decided they wanted to make a new product. A lot of the justification was they saw the need with existing customers, and they could make $200M+ ARR by simply getting their existing customers to use it. They invested a lot of money in marketing, created a lot of hype, and built up a huge worldwide org.
One of the premises of the product was that if you had a fleet of machines using this product, it would be a force multiplier for extracting value out of a particular broadly defined use case.
Except, engineering and product management was so busy getting the engineers to build something that could scale to infinity, they never bothered to improve the basic stuff that let somebody get value during a trial period. Customers would struggle to deploy and integrate this thing onto one machine. And when they did, they didn't see the value.
Leadership always parroted the same thing. Slides about once you have thousands of machines using this, the value is there. But over 3 years nobody really implemented a nice way of integrating 5 machines, let alone 1000.
3 years later the org went from 3000 employees worldwide to a few sales people in every region and development mostly being done in India. Comically enough, the lack of financial resources meant that the new management had to focus on things that actually mattered to customers. So the product actually got a lot better. But by that time all the momentum and trust was gone.