The life (and death) of a product

We are planning it… Yeah, it is a big deal. We’ll need to work more, learn new things… but it seems that it will all be worth it!

And, then… it’s born. You notice how fragile it is. It seems like anything you do to it might cause eternal harm. However, you know you should prepare it for the world, conquering all the things you imagined it could.

Somehow, all the plans you make seem to be in vain. When the day comes, everything is different than you anticipated and it follows another path. So you learn that plans are made to be changed, but the values must not be broken. It needs to carry your values throughout its life!

It grows fast. When you notice it, it is already earning its own money. But you want it to reach higher stakes. You invest in more knowledge and resources so it can be the only one at its expertise. And you know that, even when you are not around anymore, you did a great job and it will have a better and longer life.

However, it comes a time when there’s not much to do. A time where you realize that you were right at the beginning. It, in fact, is fragile. You remember that the only thing we are sure of is death, and what is left for you to do is to increase its lifespan and make the transition easier.

You fight, with all your forces, not to lose it. But, one day, you see that there’s no reason why you should keep fighting it. It is already gone. So you give up and mourn.

One day, you see that the product you built brought immense joy and experience to you. It even brought money. And that, now, with its operations ceased, and your feelings restored, you think of building the next one.

I know. I’m dramatic. But I want to talk about the end of life. Not human life. For that, you have tons of blog posts around. I wanna talk about the end of a product’s life.

Everything dies. And your product is no different. It may take one, five or ten years but, eventually, it will cease. Some may say that Google or Facebook will never die. But those are not products anymore; they are platforms that contain different products. They keep renewing their solutions with different products. Google plus and Facebook Moments are examples of products that died recently.

One of the most challenging things to do with a dying product is to motivate everyone to continue working on it. To make it work, I like to make a parallel with an older adult that discovered they have an inoperable disease.

Even though the person knows she is going to die, she doesn’t stop wanting to live (or at least she shouldn’t). The doctors usually try to make her life better and give her the best rest of life possible. The same works with software. In these cases, we should do all we can to maintain the software stable, our customers happy and the cash flowing.

But… is that it? We just lost a product and a source of revenue? No. With human life, we indeed cannot do much. But with products, we can create new ones, that will lead us towards our, now different, goals.

Here at Bionexo, we decided to rewrite our main product, building a better and faster version of itself. We made that decision five years ago when our product was at the peak of its life. However, it was already presenting some signs of weakness. The lead time to release a new feature was increasing and the number of bugs was skyrocketing.

This year we’ll release the new version of our product. And, suddenly, I found myself with a team that thinks they are working with outdated software, wasting their time on something we knew would soon be replaced.

But what they didn’t understand was that not all the users would have access to the new version on day 1. It would be crazy to migrate thousands of companies, that depend on our software to generate revenue, from one day to the other. Therefore, our older version will continue to live. I’d not say it has an inoperable disease as aforementioned. It still serves our biggest clients, and they are pretty happy with it. But I’d say it is on that phase where you need to take care of your blood sugar, eat more vegetables and practice Pilates. Maybe, doing everything right, you’ll live more than you expected.

And that should be the team’s vision of a product. The tech market is incredibly dynamic. What if, instead of migrating all of our customers to the new platform, we niche both of them to different publics? That could happen! That is where I think our product team failed back at the time. We were so energized about the fact that a new platform would be ready that we forgot to motivate our teams about the importance of the product that is the biggest, better, more stable and that generates the most significant part of our revenue. How could someone not want to work with that kind of product?!

Nonetheless, I think the takeaway from this text is: it doesn’t matter in which phase of your product you are working on; it always has its goals and its importance to the company strategy. Therefore, lead your products as a doctor treats a patient: know your product’s age, its history, expectations, limitations and use those to define its prognosis and the best treatment possible.