I didn't get it wrong, but the company I worked for did. I spent 2.5 years creating a sales tool that they dropped the same day I released it. The company went with Salesforce instead.
It was really disheartening to have 2.5 years of hard work dropped like that, but it was absolutely the right choice. They had designed it themselves and it was barely functional. They had a lot of upgrades planned to make it do what they really wanted.
That's just bad management. It didn't take them until the release date to realize that SF was the right choice. They just procrastinated until they couldn't anymore when you released your project.
I had the same thing happen at a previous job. My team built and executed and hit every object and was ready to ship and that's when they decided to inform us that they don't want to ship what we built and wants us to integrate our features into a product they had acquired. Like that decision could have been made 6 months or even a year earlier. Instead they procrastinated until the last moment. I decided to leave the company after that. Seeing 2 years of effort and good execution flushed down the toilet was very disheartening.
Can you tell me more about the Salesforce decision? Salesforce is one of those companies that I hear the name a lot, but seldom do I get to read insights about them.
Salesforce (SFDC) provides the customer relationship management (CRM) solution where your entire sales team will view prospects and do data entry on their status in the sales cycle. People build entire industry-specific solutions on top of its (IMO horrid) API and have been doing so since the early 2000s; they had an App Exchange long before Apple had a consumer-facing App Store: https://9to5mac.com/2011/08/26/salesforce-boss-tells-a-story...
It's absurdly complex and had a reputation for being annoyingly slow for any user interaction (though reportedly that's improved in the recent half-decade). If your needs are unusual (say, for a B2B2C multi-sided marketplace where dynamics are counterintuitive and your schema constantly changes) it may be difficult to iterate fast enough with Salesforce. But if you're doing any kind of B2B sales, and you want something that everyone knows, that will grow (however painfully) with your organization, it's the default choice.
Also worth noting that they acquired Slack last year for $27B, and overall have a $128B market cap.
I was in the same boat and finally did an implementation just recently. Salesforce is a crazy beast. At it's heart is really just a CRM. A tool for tracking and nurturing customer relationships. Different businesses have very different kinds of relationships with customers if you're like a giant retailer vs something like selling industrial equipment to manufacturers so making a tool to cover all those cases is hard. Salesforce to me really feels like a UI-on-a-database kinda tool surrounded by a load of data manipulation tools. It's also rife with DSLs (Apex, derived from Java and two custom flavors of SQL). The big thing about Salesforce is just how big it is. It integrates with everything, they have a robust app marketplace and dozens of integration partners, they've acquired loads of complementary software companies like Exact Target, Tableau, Mulesoft and now Slack and Heroku. It's expensive has a ton of operational overhead but everyone in that domain knows what it does and how to use it.
I added some code for our Salesforce integration, but I never actually used it, nor did I see it used. So I don't have any insights there beyond what's already on their own page.
I have frequently found myself directed to build something when it clearly would have been better for the company to buy (or use SaaS). It seems like a lot of business owners and managers have some mental block that makes it hard for them to pay for that kind of thing directly, but easy for them to burn shitloads of developer, ops, and support hours doing the same thing in-house even when there's no strong business reason to do so. Totally bizarre.
I did, but I can't remember how much longer it was until they decided to stop giving me good raises, so I left them. I think I got 1 more good raise out of them after that, but then they hired a new CTO and that stopped.
I now think they were desperately trying to pump up their valuation so they could sell, since they did that less than a year after I left.
It was really disheartening to have 2.5 years of hard work dropped like that, but it was absolutely the right choice. They had designed it themselves and it was barely functional. They had a lot of upgrades planned to make it do what they really wanted.