Unshipped

A podcast about the things that never launched. Every episode, someone walks us through a project that died — the startup that ran out of road, the feature that shipped to nobody, the album that never got mixed, the building that was never built. What it was, how far it got, and the exact moment it became clear it was over. We are not interested in the tidy lesson at the end. Most of these stories do not have one. We are interested in the part everybody skips: what it was actually like to be inside a thing that was quietly failing, before anyone was willing to say so out loud. New episodes every other Tuesday. Hosted by Nell Farrow and Vikram Sethi.

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The feature we spent a year on and turned off in a week

It worked. It was well-built. Everyone hated it. Marguerite on shipping something excellent that nobody wanted.

Marguerite Osei led a team that spent a year building a feature that was, by every internal measure, excellent: well-tested, fast, beautifully designed, and shipped on time. It was switched off eight days later. This episode is about the gap between "we built it well" and "we should have built it", and about what happens to a team that did outstanding work in service of the wrong idea. Marguerite is generous about her own role in it, which is rarer than it should be.