> Maybe analyze the target audience before shipping?

The problem is that there’s a risk the analysis finds out that “the product adequately fits our target market’s needs, there’s no easy way to adapt to another market, so most pragmatic approach is to stay put, cut costs and reallocate resources to marketing or other projects”.

No product/project manager and very few devs want to hear they’re not needed, so it’s better for everyone is busywork is continuously being made up, regardless of whether it’s actually beneficial for the business.

I’ve been at dysfunctional places where the winning strategy would’ve been to just give the whole team a 3-month paid holiday while higher level management figures out an actual direction for the product, rather than desperately thrashing around and causing damage/tech debt that would continuously slow down further development (I originally wrote “that would need to be fixed later”, but who am I kidding, that will never happen).