Sunsetting: The Missing Ingredient of Your Product Roadmap
As Product Managers, it’s our job to create value for our users and our company. And so we ask ourselves:
How can we add more value to our product?
What often follows is a laundry list of new features to address certain problems or improvements for already existing features. If we brainstorm some more, we’ll end up with even more new and additional things to build. And here is the problem. We often assume that the only way to increase the value for our users is to add something. Adding is seen as inherently positive. After all, intuition and experience tell us people won’t object to receiving more for the same amount of investment from their side. And while this is true in a variety of cases and I believe could be a sound strategy to delight users, it need not be the only one you should be considering.
We have all heard time and time again that ‘Less is More’ but if you simply look again at your roadmap, I bet there isn’t a single item focused on sunsetting a feature or service. Simply put, we don’t see removing code as a value-adding activity. Instead, we see it as less exciting because there isn’t something inherently new about it. The novelty factor, a major excitement ingredient, is zero. Your engineers want to build cool stuff. This makes it harder to get them or other stakeholders on board.
Sunsetting a feature could also be seen as a signal that building it in the first place was a mistake. Building the right products the right way is hard and we get plenty of learning opportunities along the way. However, sometimes Product Managers could find it difficult to admit failures and are unlikely to engage in the analysis and discussions needed to determine if sunsetting is a good option or not. This is especially true in companies where a ‘Fail-Safe’ culture isn’t present. After all, we tend to celebrate launches and we tend to mourn dead features. I know I would much rather be in a celebratory mode.
But when done right, sunsetting has its benefits. By eliminating sub-performing features or services, users are likely to benefit from the more streamlined experience. They can now fully have their attention on your well-performing features. You have less code to maintain and less complexity and that frees up time to focus on delivering value where it really counts. Removing code really could provide value for the user and the organization and I hope next time you’re thinking of what to put on your roadmap you remember this.
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