I'm not sure how much more I could have communicated. "Feature X is done and i'm going to show it on thursday". "OK looks good". Behind the scenes, without t

I'm not sure how much more I could have communicated. "Feature X is done and i'm going to show it on thursday". "OK looks good". Behind the scenes, without telling me, telling other stakeholders "feature X is not being done". Demo feature X. "Whoah, you really blindsided us and made people look like they don't know what they're doing". Had this been, say, 5 weeks ahead of time, yeah, maybe. This was ... 3 days? Monday afternoon to Thursday afternoon - maybe you could count that as 4. This had grown to the point where I wasn't allowed to directly talk to the major stakeholders. This demo meeting was the time to talk to them, for a dog and pony show only. 18 months earlier we had more regular (still in a group) communication, but it was possible to talk directly. As this grew, my own ability to talk directly to people was layered with middlemen, which exacerbated this sort of problem (had happened before, but never for something this 'important'). What's... funny about all this is that the earlier PM had made this feature of paramount important, but it turns out ... no one is using it. EDIT: both at the time, and now, I looked at it as "mistake". we're human and things happen. but it was framed as "lowercased was hiding information, working in secret". this was not the case.