I (as well as a few others on the team) spent six months working on a new web app that my company had decided would be the future of the department (my boss said those exact words to me), and that they'd sell to two different major clients (one was a major pharmacy and another was a major health insurance company. You've almost certainly heard of them).
We already had them as clients for other services we provided, this was just something new that the higher ups were sure they'd go for (I think it solved a real need of theirs, their call center people were doing a lot of looking things up manually across like 60 excel spreadsheets during calls, IIRC, and part of what this did was combine all that data into a central area that's easily searchable, plus some other nice-to-have call center features like being to schedule appointments or something, I think).
We got a nearly production-ready MVP in front of them and demo'd it, they seemed interested but we could never get them to sign a contract, for months. One of them eventually decided to recreate something similar in-house and actually had the gall to request that we send them all the business logic we came up with while doing it (for free), the other just never signed a contract.
Well anyway, after failing to get those two clients, the execs must have decided that it was no longer the future of the department, and was quietly shelved.
I might as well not have done anything that six months. Although I did get a bit more comfortable with using Angular at the time, thanks to that project.
That company did that multiple times, btw. Because of the nature of the health industry, and how often they drag their heels for contracts, they often decided they had to start work without a contract in place or else wouldn't have it ready by the annual health insurance open enrollment period, which is when health insurance companies were busiest and where companies that offered services to those companies (our company) made all of their money (think of it kind of like how game companies don't want to miss the holiday season for their new releases). But it resulted in them doing work and not getting paid for it. I wasn't surprised to find out the department was eventually shut down a few years after I quit.
We already had them as clients for other services we provided, this was just something new that the higher ups were sure they'd go for (I think it solved a real need of theirs, their call center people were doing a lot of looking things up manually across like 60 excel spreadsheets during calls, IIRC, and part of what this did was combine all that data into a central area that's easily searchable, plus some other nice-to-have call center features like being to schedule appointments or something, I think).
We got a nearly production-ready MVP in front of them and demo'd it, they seemed interested but we could never get them to sign a contract, for months. One of them eventually decided to recreate something similar in-house and actually had the gall to request that we send them all the business logic we came up with while doing it (for free), the other just never signed a contract.
Well anyway, after failing to get those two clients, the execs must have decided that it was no longer the future of the department, and was quietly shelved.
I might as well not have done anything that six months. Although I did get a bit more comfortable with using Angular at the time, thanks to that project.
That company did that multiple times, btw. Because of the nature of the health industry, and how often they drag their heels for contracts, they often decided they had to start work without a contract in place or else wouldn't have it ready by the annual health insurance open enrollment period, which is when health insurance companies were busiest and where companies that offered services to those companies (our company) made all of their money (think of it kind of like how game companies don't want to miss the holiday season for their new releases). But it resulted in them doing work and not getting paid for it. I wasn't surprised to find out the department was eventually shut down a few years after I quit.