If you are afraid of writing unneeded, unimportant, and unpopular things enough to label them as a "failure", your focus may be to find needed and important things for your audiences.
Your focus may be to read the draft to a select sample audiences everyday, every week, continuously, and apply various analytical techniques to different statistical models you built from the feedbacks to overcome your fear of rejection, and "manage" direction, completion, and shipment of your writing.
Or just write. A lot. And read. A lot. You'll "get" trends. You'll "get" what works and what doesn't. Of course you need feedbacks. Of course you need plans and management especially if you are co-writing with many authors.
But my focus is still to write.
If the customer didn't order it, it doesn't matter how well you coded.