Discussion of how to retire – or ‘antilaunch’ – legacy products
» Just over half of product managers surveyed rate themselves poor at retiring a product
» Consider how people may continue using your product after it is retired, or the company exits
» Activists are pushing to prevent companies from bricking devices reliant on cloud software
When sunsetting a product or feature:
» Explain why honestly and be transparent about how it will impact your users
» Be understanding as they may be disappointed or frustrated by the change
» Be responsive and supportive by answering your users’ questions and helping them with the transition
» If possible, offer your users alternative features or solutions
» Your users must value your product more than it would cost them to switch
» An end-of-life policy sets out the process you will use to retire products for customers
» Think about your users and customers’ technical and economic issues first
» Retiring a product gracefully means making a plan
Product managers are full of contradictions: if we’re not busting a gut to launch something, we’re trying to kill our older products off.
A product manager who thinks they’ve got an easy ride because their product is a cash cow is probably missing the point. While failing or unpopular products have a more obvious set of problems to tackle, successful ones have a different set of arguably trickier problems
As a product manager, how do you know you’re doing your job well? This article outlines the problem with traditional metrics for product managers and offers some better alternatives for measuring success: communication, ideas, roadmapping, launch and end-of-life.
