When shutting down a product is the right thing to do
In Google has a company strategy, not a product strategy Jackie Bavaro argues that instead of product strategies, Google has… this:
She goes on to argue that this is the main reason so many of Google’s products get shut down:
It’s a good post (that she accurately calls “spicy”!). I found it particularly interesting because how Jackie describes Google reminds me of one of the key principles we had at Wildbit:
We wanted to keep working together as a team, which meant we had to create products that people love and are willing to pay for, and that is what drove us. We were always worried about being defined only by our biggest product, so we kept experimenting with different things. Sometimes it worked—DMARC Digests is still going strong. And sometimes it didn’t—the team shut down Conveyor after the final pivot just didn’t work as well as we had hoped. But in the midst of it all, our #1 principle remained intact:
When we shut down Conveyor that team didn’t leave—they moved back into the larger team to work on our other products. So as I reflect on why the decision was made to shut down (or find a new home for) some of our products over the years, I’d like to believe that we didn’t do it because we didn’t have a product strategy—we understood our audience and the problems we were solving for them very well. We did it because when it comes down to it, all products are experiments until they’re not. And when we couldn’t get experiments to a place where they supported our founders, the team, the customers, and the community well—when the situation essentially violated our company principles—we had to face that reality and act on it. I think that’s ok, by the way. When a team has the safety to know that they won’t lose their jobs if the product they’re working on isn’t ultimately succesful, they are able to more clearly see the world for how it is. They can acknowledge when a product isn’t on a path to success, and when it’s time to move on. I miss Google Reader and Google Inbox too. But after working in a “product-agnostic” company for 6 years I have more empathy for teams who decide to shut down products that seem to have a big following. The issue is not necessarily that those teams don’t have clear product strategies. It’s that sometimes the gap between product strategy and product reality becomes too large, and keeping the product going would end up doing a disservice to the business, the team, and customers. Strong product leadership is seeing reality, acknowledging it, and keeping the team safe during the process of shifting to a new experiment or existing product. What I’m readingMy friend Francisco Inchauste co-wrote a book called The Product Design Process Handbook, and it looks fantastic:
I got myself a copy and can’t wait to dig in. I’ll follow up with a full review once I’ve read it! 🚨 Elezea readers get 20% off with the coupon code Kyle Poyar has a great interview with Hotjar CEO Mohannad Ali about product-led growth (PLG). Inside Hotjar’s bootstrapped PLG strategy is full of interesting insights, such as this observation about how your strategy should change over time:
→ This is a good companion piece on product-led growth: The New User Journey: Follow Your Users to Understand how to Excel at Go-to-Market. → This one too: On becoming a product-led SaaS business. → And of course, read and bookmark Leah Tharin’s excellent Product-led growth guide. → Oh wait, one more! Speaking of Kyle Poyar… Esteban Contreras has an interview with Kyle about product-led growth for his Product State newsletter. Lots of addition resources to explore in that one as well. I like Adam Thomas’s idea of identifying “survival metrics” at the start of a project. It’s a way to help teams stay grounded throughout the project and ask themselves whether they should stop the work, pivot into a different direction, or continue to invest in completing the project. From What Are Survival Metrics & How Do They Work?:
Adam goes on to discuss three questions that help teams identify those survival metrics. Some stray links
A farewell tweet |
Key phrases
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