Company gave the Product team full reign and always "deferred" paying off tech debt to chase the next quarterly goal or business pivot. Eventually the tech stack was a giant, messy tarball with no test coverage and layers of hacks, but everyone could still deliver features because the original team was still there (this also provided justification to the Product team that tech debt payoff was unnecessary or could be "deferred" again).
After a while, business stagnation from constant pivots and new initiatives resulted in attrition and a downward spiral of budget cuts and reduced morale. Attrition and knowledge loss caused velocity to drop, which caused more of the team to leave, which made the business stagnation worse, which caused morale to go down more and budgets further cut, etc. Eventually the company couldn't recruit the same level of talent to replace people who left, hiring standards dropped dramatically, and it was now impossible to pay off tech debt or even really run the tarball reliably anymore (a Ruby monolith running an ancient, unsupported version of Rails with a million security holes and bugs).
Engineering leadership made a mass exodus, the few people that were left ended up on a death watch as the move to an outsourced engineering org from India was implemented on the way towards a full migration to a 3rd party vendor platform. Software engineering was completely eliminated from the company and the lesson the company leadership took from this was that "we never should have built the platform in the first place" along with a dose of "external business factors outside of our control caused the decline in revenue, forcing us to make hard decisions".
After a while, business stagnation from constant pivots and new initiatives resulted in attrition and a downward spiral of budget cuts and reduced morale. Attrition and knowledge loss caused velocity to drop, which caused more of the team to leave, which made the business stagnation worse, which caused morale to go down more and budgets further cut, etc. Eventually the company couldn't recruit the same level of talent to replace people who left, hiring standards dropped dramatically, and it was now impossible to pay off tech debt or even really run the tarball reliably anymore (a Ruby monolith running an ancient, unsupported version of Rails with a million security holes and bugs).
Engineering leadership made a mass exodus, the few people that were left ended up on a death watch as the move to an outsourced engineering org from India was implemented on the way towards a full migration to a 3rd party vendor platform. Software engineering was completely eliminated from the company and the lesson the company leadership took from this was that "we never should have built the platform in the first place" along with a dose of "external business factors outside of our control caused the decline in revenue, forcing us to make hard decisions".