You can work hard all year and still have nothing a customer uses. These are the usual reasons.
Collecting logos. Signing is not shipping. Put “live and adopted” on the wall, not “partners signed.”
Deck-first outreach. They did not ask for your story. They asked, without knowing it, for a workflow and named overlap.
No scope. Friendly calls, no user stories, no acceptance criteria. Engineering will never pick this up.
No owner. A committee, a generic partner@ inbox, a champion who cannot assign engineers. Treat that as a no.
Launch-and-forget. The listing goes live, nobody tells the customers who asked, nobody watches errors. The integration rots.
Polite zombies. A dead partnership left live because ending it feels rude. Ending it cleanly is the adult move.
Doing product’s job, or sales’ job, and not the join between them. You are the join.
Write these on a card. Look at it when a week felt busy. If the week did not kill, scope, ship, or unblock, it was motion without the job.