The spike ends with a recorded demo and a slide deck claiming the custom pricing engine beats the SaaS alternative by 12 percent on margin capture. The deck never leaves the room.
No one forces the team to wire the new engine into the existing billing ledger or run it against last month's real transaction set. The vendor quote stays on the table because it requires only a signature.
Two months later the same product director signs the SaaS contract after the vendor supplies a fresh demo that hides the per-transaction surcharge buried in the fine print.
The pattern repeats because the organisation measures spike success by deck quality and stakeholder attendance, not by whether any line of new code handled live load or reconciled a single invoice.
Founders who insist on a shipped micro-feature before any buy decision force the internal team to confront the real integration tax. That single constraint kills half the deck-driven choices inside a quarter.
Procurement still pushes back because the spike lacks an approved budget code. The product director either fights for the code or keeps signing licences that lock the firm into the vendor's roadmap.
The organisations that escape this loop treat every build spike as a release candidate with a named owner accountable for the first production transaction, not the final presentation.