I worked one place that missed a golden opportunity to build one to throw away. The short version is that the team formed and started working on the designated

I worked one place that missed a golden opportunity to build one to throw away. The short version is that the team formed and started working on the designated product, but very shortly after a VP-level exec got directly involved and started asking about where "his" product was. This was before I joined, so I'm not sure if the original direction was supposed to include this or if there was some management nonsense behind it, but the team had to quickly pivot and deliver something for this needy VP that was kind of sort of related to their stated goal. In any case, the programmers got their marching orders and rushed out something to satisfy the VP, then went back to focusing on their original goals. The real work overlapped, in technology and business function, with the rush goal. After they were done, they could have stepped back, taken a look at what they did to get it done, identify the shortcomings, missteps, and undesirable consequences of the decisions made for that work. They could have proceeded with the main work using all the lessons from the 'emergency' work, and avoided a lot of the problems they'd created in rush to production. Instead, they decided to build, or perhaps more accurately defaulted to building, the real product on top of the work they done for the rush job. After another six or eight months, the project was in serious enough trouble that programmers were leaving, and they ended up with an almost 100% turnover in engineers. The manager's response was to start micromanaging everything and set the team up for a death march to a predefined release date.