Context
Wallex is one of Iran's larger crypto exchanges. On the Tap team I was product manager for a product connecting a bank card directly to a gold account: real money, real banking rails, real regulation. We were in early stages and had not reached first launch when the war began, and the team was dissolved in a round of cost cuts. I was kept on and moved to WallGold, a Wallex subsidiary, where I now build GoldCup.
The reframe
There isn't a clean reframe here, and I would be inventing one if I forced it. The honest version: I did not find the insight in time. Most of why this never shipped is that we kept building before we had proven the one thing the product lived or died on.
What I built
How far it actually got: product and design for the card-to-gold flow, in early build. It never reached a first launch and never touched a real user. I want to be precise about that, because 'I built a card-to-gold product' would be true only by rounding, and rounding is how an honest resume quietly turns into a dishonest one.
What I killed
The thing I should have killed sooner was scope. A regulated money product makes you want to handle every edge case before you show anyone, and that instinct reads as rigor right up until it is the reason nothing ships. I learned that here, the expensive way.
Outcome
There is no outcome. The product never reached users, so there is nothing here to measure and nothing I am entitled to claim.
Where my role stopped
I was product manager for a team of seven to eight. I did not own engineering, the banking integration, or the decision to dissolve the team.
What I know now
The war is true, and it is not the reason. Teams shipped things in those same months. What I know now is that I treated 'not ready to show anyone yet' as a sign of standards, when a good part of it was fear, mine included. Since then I have not let a team I am on go more than a few weeks without putting the real thing in front of a stranger, however rough. That single rule would have changed how this ended.