The incentives against speaking up to people up the chain are very strong, and sometimes management does illogical things for logical reasons. I worked on a PO

The incentives against speaking up to people up the chain are very strong, and sometimes management does illogical things for logical reasons. I worked on a POC of a vendor product that, frankly, sucked. No one wanted to buy the thing but few would speak up to say so. No one could understand where we would use it or why. UI was 20 years out of date, it used an esoteric OOP scripting language instead of SQL, it was slower than our existing system, and no one had ever heard of the thing before. Basically it repeated all the existing complaints about our current stack, worse. CTO was IN LOVE and it was clearly not a POC but a matter of finding an excuse to buy it & tech lead to own it. My teammate and I were two of the few tech guys DGAF enough to clearly communicated it was a bad product, to which the response was that it was getting bought and they really wanted us to run the project, lol. No thanks. We both left within a year. So why? After I left I found out. The CTO was rather on the outs with our major business side stakeholder, and that guy had told him his buddy had this product we should really check out. So CTO saw it as - let me score some quick points by doing what the stakeholder says, and just minimize the blast radius of wherever we integrate it.