The following story is true -- I have confirmed it myself. The names have been changed to protect the guilty.

Foobar, Inc. made widgets. Not just any widgets, widgets that had potential to be unique in the industry. The challenge that Foobar had was that the widget stretched the engineering team thin and an effort to hit time to market left the widget prone to spontaneously exploding.

As you might imagine, the whole "spontaneous explosion" thing created a bit of a difficulty in sales and support. However, the CEO and CTO/VP of Engineering felt that the problem was really in sales -- if the sales team were to just sell around the issues and stay focused on the value proposition, widget sales would be through the roof.

Now call me nuts, but when your product has a tendency to spontaneously explode, time to market means very little. Everyone in the company (especially those yippie dog happy people in marketing) has to come to terms with this fact, no matter how ugly.

However... Those that complained about the issues around spontaneous explosions were often let go. As one might imagine, this resulted in a culture where despite the Emperor being stark raving naked, any mention of nudity was strictly forbidden.

While all of this joy is happening and impressive sums of cash were being spent every month to keep the company afloat, it was decided that spending a few engineering cycles to try out new product ideas seemed like a good thing. Doubly so since marketing would not be involved. After all, nothing good ever came out of marketing. (Yes, I'm being facetious.)

The CTO/VP of Engineering decided that it would be cool to make a gadget based on the findings from the engineering effort. The gadget oozed so much coolness, the little detail that it had nothing to do with widgets was moot. It was sexy and the CEO was sold that everyone and their brother would want one. And so it was -- Foobar, Inc. was in the business of making gadgets too.

Some pest over by those shiny happy people in marketing made a cautious attempt at pointing out the little detail of performing market research. Maybe even go so far as try out one of those new fangled "business plan" thingies. The shiny happy person pulled his head out of the Guilotine(*) of Logic when the CEO proclaimed that anyone that wastes one second of time on such nonsense would be promptly fired.

With the sales team taking a "let it bake a little first before it explodes on my customer" approach to new version/product introductions, there was a latency of about 4-6 months before new versions were really getting traction in the field. To address this problem, the CEO decided that an announcement for the new product would go out before it was built. The effort was further accelerated because it was decided that the project would be outsourced, which as we all know, guarantees that the first version will arrive on time, with the right features, and within budget.

A mockup datasheet was deemed enough justify two actions to happen in parallel: start looking for outsourcing vendors and a press release for the new product.

Yes, you read that right. A press release. Of a product. That only had a datasheet written for it.

The shiny happy marketing person (who has told me the story, and thus has proclaimed 100% innocence in the matter) recalled the day the press release hit the wire. He had come out of a few meetings in some midwest city where efforts to sell widgets (remember those?) were still in progress. While at the airport, he received a call from another shiny happy marketing person that was just a wee bit frantic. You see, someone from a major press outlet decided that the press release was interesting enough to pick up and write a story about. The press fellow needed an interview that the story could hit print the following day.

Our hero, (the shiny happy marketing person in the midwest city, that is...) found a corner, pulled out his notebook, and took the call.

Reporter: So, how does the gadget do its voodoo?
Marketer: Um, well, it does it by using this cool spell.
(Marketer writes the spell down)
R: And does the gadget also jump buildings in a single leap?
M: Um, yeah. It does that especially well.
(Marketer writes down "leaps tall buildings")
R: And is it faster than a speeding bullet?
M: It most certainly is.

And so on, and so forth.

Yes, over the course of a 15 minute interview at an airport in the midwest, our fearless hero wrote the first PRD for the gadget.

Meanwhile, in the bat cave...

An anxious outsourcing company managed to produce a 140 page proposal for building the gadget based on the one page data sheet mock up. Budget was allocated and approved while the flight carrying the only thing resembling a PRD was in the air.

The story takes several additional weird turns, but they unfortunately are a bit too identifying so I will stop here. The key point -- how not to release a product -- has already been made.

In the end, the Foobar, Inc. ran out of money. The folks that came in to pick up the pieces to try and figure out out to make something out of what remained killed the gadget before the first one left the building. The decision to kill the gadget was ironically made based on market analysis that happened as part of the go-to-market effort -- there just wasn't much of a market there for the gadget to begin with. Nothing compared to widgets anyway. To this day, the market remains an extremely niche play