Teams of people at Google work on the same features, only to find out near launch that they lost to another team who had been working on the same thing without their knowledge.
It is fascinating, very wasteful and also often devastating for the teams involved who worked very hard who then have their work thrown away.
PMs/TPMs/POs may not know as they're on different teams. Often it's just a VP game and decided on preference or a power play and not on work quality/outcome.
