Pretty sure a product at this scale that required several XFN teams to execute on was not dreamt up by a couple people wanting a promotion. This was a product

Pretty sure a product at this scale that required several XFN teams to execute on was not dreamt up by a couple people wanting a promotion. This was a product that was meant to drive some KPI metric of some large organization, and it was launched with the full intention to drive it for years. Then when it wasn't meeting some target, instead of steering the ship in the right direction, the directors or VPs who funded the effort likely got bored and moved on to the next KPI. I'm sure a lot of folks at the bottom worked very hard on it and were proud of it and definitely deserved the praise on their performance reviews. However, once it lost its director or VP support, there would have been no way to keep it running.