The following is a work of fiction, but the battles, the stakes, and the hard truths are all very real.
This story might feel uncomfortably familiar. Reader discretion is advised.
Emma Caldwell arrived at VisionCore on a rainy Monday in October, carrying a banker's box of desk plants and the weight of three failed startups. At forty-two, she'd learned that Director of Product roles came in two flavors: fixing something broken or building something new. She'd been hired for the former.
Two months later, she discovered she'd been wrong.
"We're going to eat FlashLoop's lunch," Vince Moretti announced, clicking to a slide showing a hockey stick graph. The CEO had the kind of energy that made you want to believe impossible things. "Forty percent month-over-month growth. Ten million ARR. All Gen Z users."
Emma sat in the back row, watching her new colleagues lean forward. She recognized the hunger in their eyes. She'd felt it herself once, before she'd learned what that hunger cost.
"I'm calling it SyncGo," Vince continued. "We launch in four months."
Emma's coffee turned cold in her hands. Four months. For a product that didn't exist yet, for a market they didn't understand, for users who weren't theirs.
When Vince asked for questions, Emma waited. Let someone else be the skeptic. But the room stayed silent, everyone nodding like dashboard bobbleheads.
She raised her hand. "Who's our target user?"
"Gen Z," Vince said, already moving to the next slide.
"But specifically—"
"Emma." Vince's smile had edges. "I hired you to ship products, not to slow us down. FlashLoop proved the market. We just need to execute better."
The Team
Rick Chen, VP of Engineering, found Emma in the kitchen after the meeting. "You're not wrong," he said quietly, pouring coffee that looked like motor oil. "But Vince has already promised the board. We're building this thing."
"You've been here five years," Emma said. "How often does this happen?"
Rick's laugh was bitter. "Remember TurboChat? No? Exactly. Twelve million dollars. Dead in six months."
"And you didn't push back?"
"I have two kids in college and a mortgage in Palo Alto." Rick dumped sugar into his coffee. "I push back by making sure my resume is updated."
Sarah Kim from Design joined them, her iPad covered in sketches. Twenty-six years old, all ambition and no scar tissue yet. "I'm actually excited about SyncGo. My little brother is Gen Z. I know exactly what they want."
Emma wanted to warn her. Instead, she asked, "What does your brother think of FlashLoop?"
Sarah's enthusiasm dimmed slightly. "I haven't actually asked him yet."
The Build
Emma tried. She scheduled user interviews that got cancelled for "urgent sprint planning." She created personas that got ignored for being "too academic." She ran a competitive analysis that Vince dismissed as "looking backward instead of forward."
Meanwhile, the machine churned. Rick's team built infrastructure for features nobody had defined. Sarah's designers created interfaces for problems nobody had articulated. Marketing prepared campaigns for users nobody had met.
In week six, Emma made one last attempt. She'd spent her weekend at a college campus, talking to actual Gen Z users. She'd recorded their interviews, documented their needs, mapped their current solutions.
"None of them have heard of us," she told the leadership team. "And when I explained what SyncGo would do, they asked why they wouldn't just keep using FlashLoop."
Vince's face darkened. "You went behind my back to validate my vision?"
"I went to validate our product."
"My product," Vince corrected. "And it's already validated. FlashLoop validated it. Now stop questioning and start shipping."
The Launch
Four months later, SyncGo went live with a Super Bowl commercial Vince had insisted on. Two million dollars for thirty seconds of hype.
Emma watched the metrics dashboard from her apartment, having called in sick. She couldn't bear to be in the office for the celebration that would turn into a wake.
Hour one: 500 signups. The projection had been 10,000. Hour four: 80% of users abandoned onboarding. Hour twelve: The first TechCrunch article. "VisionCore's Super Bowl Fumble."
Her phone buzzed. Sarah: "This is a disaster. Nobody understands what it does."
Then Rick: "Emergency meeting tomorrow. Vince wants answers."
The Reckoning
The conference room felt like a courtroom. Vince stood at the whiteboard, drawing circles and arrows like he could diagram his way out of failure.
"We moved too slowly," he said. "FlashLoop had first-mover advantage."
"We moved too fast," Emma countered. "We never figured out what we were building."
"You never believed in the vision," Vince shot back. "That negativity infected the team."
Sarah spoke up, surprising everyone. "I believed. I was excited. But Emma was right. We never talked to actual users. My brother laughed when he saw our commercial. Said it looked like adults trying to be cool."
Rick added, "The technical execution was flawless. We built exactly what we were asked to build. The problem is what we were asked to build."
Vince's face went red. "So it's my fault?"
The room went silent. Emma realized everyone was waiting for her to answer. To be the sacrifice that would let them all move forward.
"It's not about fault," she said finally. "It's about learning. We copied a solution without understanding the problem. We valued speed over insight. We mistook motion for progress."
"You're fired," Vince said quietly.
"I know," Emma replied.
The Aftermath
Emma packed her desk plants while Sarah hovered nearby. "I'm sorry," the younger woman said. "You tried to warn us."
"I tried to warn myself too," Emma said, wrapping a succulent in newspaper. "But I still took the job. I saw the red flags and convinced myself I could change the culture."
"Will you find another product role?"
Emma looked at her half-packed box. "Probably. And it'll probably end the same way. Because most companies don't want product managers. They want feature factories with human faces."
Rick appeared with a bottle of scotch. "For the road," he said. "And for what it's worth, my resume is already out there. Sarah's too."
"Vince will survive this," Emma said. "He'll blame market conditions or execution speed or me. The board will give him another chance."
"And SyncGo?"
"They'll pivot it into something else. Rebrand it. Then quietly shut it down in six months when no one's paying attention."
Emma picked up her box. Three months at VisionCore. Not her shortest tenure, but close.
As she waited for the elevator, she heard Vince's voice from the conference room: "We need to move faster on the next product. I'm thinking AI. Everyone's doing AI."
Emma stepped into the elevator. Some lessons were only learned by those willing to learn them.
The doors closed on VisionCore. By the time they found their next Emma Caldwell, they'd have burned through another ten million.
She'd read about it in TechCrunch, probably. Another story of a company that confused confidence with competence, speed with strategy, copying with creating.
Her phone buzzed. A recruiter. "Director of Product role at a fast-moving startup. They need someone to help them compete with..."
Emma deleted the message and drove home.
