Reaping the Product End of Life: A Product Management Research Agenda
The things I don’t know about Product Retirement could fill a Medium post.
This is my ignorance on display as a research agenda.
I’ve been a product leader for a long time, and I’ve taken products from cradle to grave. The grave is as hard to get right as all the early stuff. And it’s something we all face.
All products die.
We put them down when their time is up.
But we don’t talk about it.
So product managers have little knowledge and less experience in the end-of-life stage.
Maybe you’ll have answers to some of these questions. Or know someone. Or have a theory or a story.
Questions…
How often do organizations agree on product retirement criteria before needing to kill a product?
Is pre-planning rare?
How do chiefs commonly judge the success of retirement projects?
No problems vs. Value vs. Speed
Why do product managers delay pulling the trigger?
- Hope
- Weak data
- Lack of consensus
- Distraction
How do organization attributes affect speed of product exit decision making?
For example:
- How does size affect how fast and how crisply you make exit decisions?
Is it better to turn things off earlier or later?
You prepare, then turn things off and respond to fallout.
When are you better off…
- closing early to see what things break?
(and breaking more things, breaking them worse, but giving you more time to respond)
or
- thoroughly preparing a seamless closure?
(minimizing breakage quantity and severity)?
What triggers a “farewell visit”?
A consumer farewell visit might be for…
- Saying “goodbye” to friends in the system
- Data export/migration
- Petition to restore features, products, services
- Learn terms of retirement
Q. What induces the farewell visit?
Q. What converts a farewell visit into action?
What percent of retirement projects are…
- Bullet to the Back Of The Head?
- Graceful Exits?
- Something in between?
What percent of retirement projects fail and restart?
- % fail and restart within 90 days
- % fail and restart 2 times
- % fail and restart 3+ times
- % fail and don’t restart
What percent of retirement projects dispose of the product via
- Killing it
- Harvesting and recycling parts
- Selling it
- Donating it?
Where does the retirement team come from?
- __% The existing product team
- __% Elsewhere in the organization
- __% In-house product retirement specialists
- __% Outside product retirement specialists
What percent of retirement teams work together killing products multiple times in a year?
- Does reaper expertise live in groups, in individuals, or not at all?
How many product closures do 1000 product managers lead per year?
How many weeks per year do product managers spend on product closure?
What percent of product endings result in something other than shutting down?
- % handed off to another part of the organization
- % sold to a company
- % donated to an NGO
- % released to open source
Why do some retirement projects get stalled in the execution stage?
- % Underfunded
- % Key people missing
- % Contractual commitments
- % Regulatory duty
- % Unwilling to break dependent systems
- % Hope
How do organizations respond when customers protest product closure?
Who are the decision makers in product retirement?
Who makes recommendations and who decides?
- Product
- Marketing
- Engineering
- Finance
- CEO/COO
What ToS/EULA elements help or hinder a graceful exit?
How, and how well, do leaders of product closure projects deal with the strong feelings of the product’s teams?
What constitutes meaningful notice to customers regarding product End Of Life?
By industry/segment
By geography
By age
What communication plans work best for meaningful notice?
What are the best ways to tell the product team “your product is about to die”?
What constitutes meaningful notice to independent developers and other business partners?
What regulatory trends affect product termination? Product disposal?
What works to keep key personnel working until product retirement is complete?
How do you value a retirement project that goes well?
Does the shift from creation to destruction harm the product team after the retirement?
- Does it lose unit cohesion?
- Is there some institutional version of PTSD?
- Or is it a useful break? A lagniappe?
How common are user data portability practices in product retirements? How strong?
Frequency
- No portability
- Contributed data export
- API/json
- Profiles
- Contacts
- Conversations & Gestures
Factors correlated with high portability and low portability
- Org size
- Industry/Customer Segment
- Product revenue
- Funding type/stage
- History
- Migration tools
What does the law say about shutting down a service or ending a product’s life
Jurisdictions
- US?
California, New York, Texas? - EU? UK?
- Japan?
- Canada, Commonwealth?
- BRIC?
Bodies of law
- Privacy/data protection
- Consumer/patient/client protection
- Telecom Anti-trust
How often do IT organizations and startups have repeatable practices for shutting down products?
What are the differences between great product champions and great project reapers?
- Passion vs. Dispassion
- Sense and Respond vs. Map and Conquer
- Soft Power vs. Formal Authority
- Continuous Process vs. Hard Deadlines
- Creater vs. Destroyer
- Mark on the world vs. No trace left behind
How do core values affect exit project tradeoffs?
What are the most common reasons given for a fast, rough, bullet-to-the-back-of-the-head product closure? The real reasons?
To what degree do product communities stay together and migrate when a product dies? Why? Why not?
What are the seven best discussions to have in a product team debriefing workshop?
Do companies reward or penalize retirement project managers differently than they do product managers?
You come back from lunch and are told to shut down your product by the end of the day. Could you? How well? What would you expect to go wrong?
What HR issues are most likely to screw up an otherwise clean product retirement project?
What financial reports are most useful in a post-retirement product review?
Let me ask you a few questions about your own product hospice experiences.
Dear Product Manager,
Are you ready to prepare for end-of-life while your product is still healthy?
Can you shift to the happily grim mindset of a reaper?
Are you, your product’s champion, best suited and best prepared to deal death to your own products?
It’s time for new #prodmgmt specialty.
The Reaper.
Share your product death stories to improve reaping
- Your stories from real product endings: Anecdotes tell us what to test
- Instrumented experiments: Share hard data
- Surveys: How people think
- Prediction markets: Test conclusions
Product Reaping could become a standalone product management discipline
More science, less art
More ROI, less housekeeping
More brand building, less brand protection
More experience, less “ooh, that’s a wheel”
More up front planning and prep, less last minute scramble
More reaping ecosystem:
- apps (or features in #prodmgmt apps)
- markets (for selling features, products)
- services (project support)
Email or tweet your stories, suggestions, referrals or just call +1–510–343–5664 @evanwolf Linkedin.com/in/philwolff
Hi, I’m Phil Wolff. I’m a consulting product manager in Bellingham, Washington. I co-founded four startups, worked as a programmer, project manager, business analyst, technology architect, industry analyst, operations researcher, and tech journalist at Bechtel National, Wang Labs, LSI Logic, Adecco SA, NavSup, and privacy NGOs. I volunteered with Code for America’s #OpenOakland brigade.
