Why I Shut Down Trailway

05 Feb 2026

I started Trailway to solve a pain I’d felt as a Product Manager: spending about 20% of my time testing features before release. I believed automation could reduce PM workload and accelerate shipping.

I pitched this idea to Antler in NYC and was accepted into their Fall 2025 cohort to validate the thesis.

Over the course of building and testing Trailway, I learned four hard truths:

1. The pain is real but not urgent:
   • PMs feel the pain, but it’s not urgent. Most saw hiring more PMs or adding QA as a future solution.
   • Engineers feel almost no pain because PMs or QA handle it.
   • QA teams see new feature testing as baseline work, not a top priority.
2. There was no clear owner:
   • In PM/Eng-only teams, ownership of pre-release testing is ambiguous. Sometimes engineers thoroughly test new features, making it easy for the PM to approve the release. More often PMs delegate testing to Engineering and when that fails, they take on testing by default.
   • When QA teams exist, they own execution. But depending on their experience with the platform, PMs shadow-own by double-checking the work.
3. No clear budget or power to bring on a new tool:
   • QA lacks budget and influence to bring in new tools.
   • PMs hesitate to formalize responsibility by bringing in new QA tools.
   • Engineers have higher priority work to do.
4. The solution is messy and context-dependent:
   • Every company’s SDLC process was different, making a one-size-fits-all solution difficult.
   • General prototypes weren’t attracting early adopters.

In summary, new feature release testing stayed broken because the pain was uneven and non-urgent, ownership was ambiguous, decision-makers lacked budget or incentive to adopt tools, and the underlying workflows varied too much for a simple, compelling solution.

Without a co-founder to share the load and challenge these learnings, the constant friction slowly wore down my conviction and made it hard to keep going.

As I learned more about the complexity of the QA market, I chose not to pivot, since it pulled me further away from my original goal of helping product managers. For more insight into the QA market landscape, read my post: The Quiet Crisis in QA.

I’m grateful for the chance to explore a problem I care about. Thank you to everyone in the Antler program, the people who took meetings with me for research and advising, and my friends and family who were my sounding board throughout.

This post is meant as a high-level overview. For deeper questions, feel free to contact me—details are on the home page.