You build for a much smaller segement than expected, lose money, die
When enterprise customers throw their weight around and start solutionising, often in a way that doesn’t even work for them. You shackle the rest of your users with a UX legacy that they get used to and can’t break out of, trapping you in perpetual mediocrity.
Internal stakeholders can also massively skew the selection of problems and design of solutions
Take operational Department A, whose admin workload might go up by 2 hours a week if a new product is built
A’s boss kicks and screams until the product team agrees to only launch once an incredibly complicated and niche automation is built, rife with failure modes and security holes
So instead of shipping something, immediately generating value and building that automation once the main solution is in prod, you’re sat there shaving yaks and losing more money in dev hours and unearned revenue than it would have ever saved Department A
Causes
Usually bigger enterprise customers who threaten to pull their custom
Or a disproportionately noisy minority of non-representative customers
Internal teams driven by their own KPIs that don’t perfectly align (this is a big topic)
Although this requires real fixing, in the short run just calling out the conflicting priorities and getting everyone to align on a compromise will have to do
If product simply does not have a strong relationship with some departments or a loud department elbows in, you can end up prioritising problems that are just not as valuable to the company
Approaches
If it’s a big customer, learn expectation management
If it’s the biggest customer, maybe let the wookie win until you can diversify revenues
If it’s an internal team, ask them how this aligns with a net increase in profitability
Figure out where you can afford to be manual-first