During my time at Google, I definitely had the experience of "my" product being killed in preference to a competing product. In one case, I did not even know that the competing product existed until the public press release.

What was most frustrating is that the decisions did not seem to be motivated by product superiority. The "winner" was not a better product, or at least this was not demonstrated. Instead the decisions were driven by whichever product better aligned with the internal political winds this week, such as the tension between the Nexus partner model vs the Pixel in-house model. These "strategy shifts" were often preceded by senior leadership shakeups, which were themselves frequent.

It was hard to escape the conclusion that the quality of my work was irrelevant. It was demoralizing.