The Vendor Path Not Taken
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I evaluated Zeroheight and Knapsack. InVision was already winding down, so it came down to those two. We chose Knapsack and spent about nine months building the internal case with my director.
Then we hit real resistance from engineering — reservations I never fully understood, whether about code access or something else entirely. Rather than string Knapsack along while internal politics played out, I ended the relationship. That wasn't an easy call. They'd been a genuinely good partner through the whole process, and they'd even built a piece of new functionality specifically to answer our engineering team's concerns, in a matter of months.
If you distill the job down enough, all we're doing is translating business requirements into solutions for customer problems. The tools will keep changing. They always have.
Someone said something close to that at an industry event I was invited to during this stretch, and it's stuck with me since. I don't have my identity tied up in a canvas tool. I'm here to solve problems a company is paying me to solve.