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How to Break Up With Your Product
A closure experience for product development
Working on a digital product is like being in a relationship. You go through an experience of growth, connection, and learning. You constantly think about it, day in and day out. It can be a frustrating and rewarding experience.
For some people, they’ve devoted years to building, improving, and maintaining a product. They intimately know it’s history as well as its strengths and shortcomings. But like most relationships, things change and sometimes you just need to move on. The product just isn’t serving the right needs for its users anymore (or your organization).
What do you do when you know the relationship is over?
The Breakup Letter
On a recent project, our team spent a lot of time aligning around change. At the core of this change was a critical product that we all recognized needed to be retired or completely overhauled in some way. Letting go is hard though, especially when you’re in a relationship with a product that you’ve devoted countless time and energy into. As one last exercise before jumping into a future vision session I facilitated a relationship ending milestone...
We wrote breakup letters to the product.
