Tag: End of life

Posted on

Ever Loved’s funeral marketplace undercuts undertakers

Fifty percent of families are scared they can’t cover the cost of a funeral. They end up overpaying because no one wants to comparison shop amidst a tragedy. That’s why ex-Googler Alison Johnston’s startup Ever Loved built a free funeral crowdfunding tool. Now it’s addressing one of the most expensive parts of saying goodbye: burial. Today Ever Loved launches its online marketplace for caskets, urns, headstones and memorial jewelry.

By sidestepping the overhead of a physical funeral home, Ever Loved can offer better prices while still earning a 10% margin. Its caskets cost 50% less than the average sold at a mortuary, according to the National Funeral Directors Association.

When I called a local San Francisco funeral home, the high markups came into focus. They quoted me $2,795 for a casket sold for $1,200 on Ever Loved.

“Most people don’t think to — or don’t want to — plan funerals in advance, which means that when someone passes away, the family is often scrambling,” Johnston tells me. “When this rush to make decisions is paired with extreme grief, many people don’t do anywhere close to the same amount of research as they would with another several-thousand-dollar purchase. When combined with the fact that most funeral homes don’t publish their prices online, it’s easy for families to spend much more than they need to.”

Johnston co-founded Ever Loved in late 2017 after a family member was diagnosed with terminal cancer. She discovered how few resources there were available for helping people plan and pay for funerals. She’d previously worked at Q&A app Aardvark through its acquisition by Google, then started online tutoring startup InstaEDU that eventually sold to Chegg. The consumer website building and e-commerce tools she’d grown used to weren’t available in the funeral industry, so she set out to build them. Ever Loved has raised seed funding from Social Capital and gone through Y Combinator.

Ever Loved co-founder and CEO Alison Johnston

“Tech too often merely makes life and work easier for those who already have it good,” she told me last year. “Tech that tempers tragedy is a welcome evolution for Silicon Valley.”

Ever Loved’s first focus was its funeral crowdfunding tool that let families ask the decedent’s loved ones to help contribute to offset the costs. Donors could leave a tip for Ever Loved, but otherwise it charged nothing beyond credit card processing fees. The tool was paired with a memorial website builder that families could use for distributing invites and collecting memories. Now Ever Loved is helping people plan thousands of funerals per month with revenue up nearly 20X year-over-year.

Now that it’s helping families raise money for remembrance services, Ever Loved wants to make sure they don’t get ripped off. The fact that there’s such low pricing transparency at funeral homes should clue you in that they try to pass off steep markups since customers might not have the energy to keep looking. “The average funeral home only helps with a funeral once every three days, meaning that many funeral homes need to charge high prices in order to cover their own fixed costs,” Johnston explains.

Remove the overhead costs and assist customers across geographies and there’s room for a strong business with more affordable prices. For example, a Stanford Blue Casket costs $990 on Ever Loved while one LA funeral home charges $1,600. The Last Supper Pieta Casket is $1,500 on Ever Loved but $6,580 from the funeral home. That funeral home had both of these listed under different names, further hindering the ability of customers to find a fair price.

Ever Loved can also more quickly adapt to the diversification of burial options. Between concerns about costs, land use, environmental impact and connection to family and nature, many are looking beyond caskets. Cremation became more popular than burial in the U.S. in 2017. Liquid cremation is now legal in 18 states, and Washington just began allowing body composting.

“We’re seeing a lot of independent providers popping up to do everything from turning your loved one’s ashes into a diamond ring to shooting their ashes into space to planting them under a tree in the forest,” says Johnston. Any single funeral home is unlikely to offer the breadth customers are looking for. “Our goal is to make all of your options available to you in an easily digestible format.”

Ever Loved’s business is protected by the FTC’s Funeral Rule that bars mortuaries from refusing or charging extra to handle a casket or urn purchased elsewhere. That means Ever Loved customers can combine shopping online with in-person memorial services from a local funeral home. Still, it’s a tough business. Startups like HaloLife, Clarity and After I Go have all shut down. Most others merely offer memorial sites, or funeral home search engines.

That means Ever Loved’s biggest competitors, beyond the standard just accepting the local mortuary’s prices, are Google and Amazon. Often they surface the same prices as Ever Loved with comparable shipping, though Google could sometimes find a slight discount by buying straight from the manufacturer, while Amazon was missing some top brands. Costco and Walmart sell funeral products too. But Johnston says “many people don’t feel like generic, mass-market stores are the appropriate place to purchase funeral products.” I agree it might feel disrespectful buying an urn from the same place you get toilet paper.

“We also put a huge focus on customer service, which you don’t get at Walmart, Costco or Amazon,” Johnston tells me. “When you’re grieving and spending thousands of dollars, we’ve found that this is very important.”

As the demographic planning funerals gets more tech-savvy over time and want personalized farewells rather than cookie-cutter conclusions, there’s a chance to change the status quo. Discussing death is becoming less taboo. Being smart about paying for it should too.

Posted on

Take Care of the Misfit Toys: Managing End of Life Products

So you’ve read all those books and articles on how to become a product manager, about how tough it is, but also how rewarding it is. Now finally you’ve become one.

I remember when I moved from being a sales engineer to product manager.  I had a picture of myself in my new role. I would be great, designing new products, grabbing market trends and customer feedback and transforming them into a shiny new toy that everyone would love (and buy). But reality is different isn’t it?

Not all Companies are Made the Same

If you join a well-established company with a successful product portfolio you’ll probably discover that before getting a new product you’ll be assigned to an existing one. I hope you get an active product, but sometimes it will be something that sounds like “we used to sell it but now revenue has dropped so we maintain it until the time for EoL (end of life) comes…”.

How are you going to manage a product that nobody wants? With no resources, no developers, no release cycle, no roadmap? This isn’t product management, is it?

Here are a few things I’ve learned so far about managing these misfit toys.

All Products are Products

The fact that a product is in sustain mode and has few or no developers assigned to it or no release cycle doesn’t mean that it is not a product. There are still customers who want to meet you and share their opinions, you’ll have bugs and features that may be good to develop and you’ll still be asked to write your epics, user stories, or features (based on your agile framework) and do research around those.

It’s a product and you’re a product manager. The lack of resources doesn’t mean you cannot improve the product or find a way to make it successful again. It only means that you have to learn to filter out the “This is what I really like to do” from the “This is what we can afford to do”.

Let me give an example from my own experience. When I started to manage these misfit toys I wondered for a long time if the backlog was really needed. Did I need to add epics and user stories to a backlog if I had no resources to develop features from it? I’ve learned that there’s always a point to doing this, that you never know if the product will revive, and even if it doesn’t, you’ll have good user stories that could be reused in another product.

One of a product manager’s priorities is always to work on the “what’s next” for the product. It means constant research about solving customer needs and the best way is to collect those ideas and information and transform them into epics and user stories. So a good product manager knows that they need to keep writing down epics and user stories and adding them to their product backlog.

All Products Have Customers

A product manager’s role is tough by definition – we all have our list of complaints about missing features, bugs, and the consequent escalations, delays in releases, market failures, and so on. But managing a product that “used to be successful” and is now on the list of forgotten things is even tougher.

As product manager, you have to learn to cope with this. Your customers still require a roadmap, to talk to you face-to-face, to understand your view on the future of the product.

For example, I was assigned to a product and found myself almost immediately involved an escalation by one of our long-standing customers. The escalation was driven by an enhancement request that had been in the backlog for a long time. Indeed, it was not my fault, nor the fault of the previous product manager, but still the enhancement request was there and nobody had informed the customer of the “why” and the possible “when” we would or would not do it. The fact that your product is in sustain mode, that is less relevant to your company, doesn’t mean that the customer doesn’t expect you to communicate with them.

Your stakeholders still require you to be able to understand how to proceed with the product, and know if there’s any chance to revive it and make it successful again, or if instead it’s better to end its life.

Try to learn as much as you can about the background of your product, talk to your team and everybody else who might help you to build a complete picture of the product ecosystem in order to:

  • Communicate with customers in a coherent way, whatever you said in previous meetings and calls count. Don’t be afraid of communicating that your plan has changed, but it should stay coherent with what has been said before. If you cannot deliver a certain feature you should explain this clearly and give the customer as much context as possible.
  • Be able to understand the context of every inquiry. The worst thing for a product manager is to receive a question from a customer and not know why the question is asked.

Be honest and don’t be afraid to meet customers. In my case, it transpired that the real issue was simply that the customer was afraid they had lost a communication channel with us, and they were left without information on the product strategy and future plans. The customer had started to wonder if we were going to kill the product, which was a key component of their infrastructure, without discussing an exit strategy for them.

All Products die

Ending a product’s life requires a lot of research. It’s a tough decision to end a product’s life because there’s no turning round. If, six months or two years later, the market asks for exactly the same product you know what bad decision everyone will complain about.

So how do you inform this decision?

1. Do a Market Check Analysis

This should cover two main topics:

  • Where the market is going
  • What is the revenue/maintenance trend of the product

The first topic is about “what we are trying to solve with the product” and “why a customer would buy our product”. You have to know your market and match it with your product. How far are you from the market requirements?

Then look at your company revenues and maintenance trends. Why are your sales reps no longer selling the product? Talk to them and find out why they are convinced that your product is unsellable. What about maintenance? How many customers are still under maintenance? When will that maintenance agreement finish? Have your biggest customers already planned an exit strategy?

2. Plan the Exit Strategy

What will happen once the product is officially retired? Can you replace it with something else? These questions are really important because they can make the difference between a strong customer retention rate and a company that acts like it doesn’t care about its customer base.

As product manager, you are responsible not only for the product but also for the customers who use it. You have to plan a strategy, and wherever possible offer an alternative to your customer that will still solve the problem your product was supposed to solve.

If there’s no exit strategy then you have to explain this to your people – sales, sales engineers, support teams – and to your customers, because you want to retain them after the product is retired. It’s a tough job.

3. Rome was not Built in a day

Ask yourself if there is still a problem to solve. If the product you’re managing had infinite resources would you be able to make it successful? Be honest with yourself and don’t be blinded by the fact that you are the product manager.

Keep in mind that the problem you tried to address with your product may still there, but could be that the problem itself has evolved and requires a different approach. As product manager, you need to be able to recognise such changes, build a new business case, and envisage a new solution that may not necessarily be the product you own.

4. Be Prepared to Fight

Killing a product is a process, and every company has its own, but you have to be prepared to explain to all the stakeholders why you want to kill your product. Build a business case, do your analysis, be prepared to have many conversations with different teams: support, sales, developers, finance.

5. Don’t be in a Hurry

Killing a product requires the steps above to be carried out carefully. Don’t be in a hurry, but don’t be scared. Product management sometimes requires bold decisions. It’s about building amazing products but also about managing them from day one to the last day.

The post Take Care of the Misfit Toys: Managing End of Life Products appeared first on Mind the Product.

Posted on

Take Care of the Misfit Toys: Managing End of Life Products

So you’ve read all those books and articles on how to become a product manager, about how tough it is, but also how rewarding it is. Now finally you’ve become one.

I remember when I moved from being a sales engineer to product manager.  I had a picture of myself in my new role. I would be great, designing new products, grabbing market trends and customer feedback and transforming them into a shiny new toy that everyone would love (and buy). But reality is different isn’t it?

Not all Companies are Made the Same

If you join a well-established company with a successful product portfolio you’ll probably discover that before getting a new product you’ll be assigned to an existing one. I hope you get an active product, but sometimes it will be something that sounds like “we used to sell it but now revenue has dropped so we maintain it until the time for EoL (end of life) comes…”.

How are you going to manage a product that nobody wants? With no resources, no developers, no release cycle, no roadmap? This isn’t product management, is it?

Here are a few things I’ve learned so far about managing these misfit toys.

All Products are Products

The fact that a product is in sustain mode and has few or no developers assigned to it or no release cycle doesn’t mean that it is not a product. There are still customers who want to meet you and share their opinions, you’ll have bugs and features that may be good to develop and you’ll still be asked to write your epics, user stories, or features (based on your agile framework) and do research around those.

It’s a product and you’re a product manager. The lack of resources doesn’t mean you cannot improve the product or find a way to make it successful again. It only means that you have to learn to filter out the “This is what I really like to do” from the “This is what we can afford to do”.

Let me give an example from my own experience. When I started to manage these misfit toys I wondered for a long time if the backlog was really needed. Did I need to add epics and user stories to a backlog if I had no resources to develop features from it? I’ve learned that there’s always a point to doing this, that you never know if the product will revive, and even if it doesn’t, you’ll have good user stories that could be reused in another product.

One of a product manager’s priorities is always to work on the “what’s next” for the product. It means constant research about solving customer needs and the best way is to collect those ideas and information and transform them into epics and user stories. So a good product manager knows that they need to keep writing down epics and user stories and adding them to their product backlog.

All Products Have Customers

A product manager’s role is tough by definition – we all have our list of complaints about missing features, bugs, and the consequent escalations, delays in releases, market failures, and so on. But managing a product that “used to be successful” and is now on the list of forgotten things is even tougher.

As product manager, you have to learn to cope with this. Your customers still require a roadmap, to talk to you face-to-face, to understand your view on the future of the product.

For example, I was assigned to a product and found myself almost immediately involved an escalation by one of our long-standing customers. The escalation was driven by an enhancement request that had been in the backlog for a long time. Indeed, it was not my fault, nor the fault of the previous product manager, but still the enhancement request was there and nobody had informed the customer of the “why” and the possible “when” we would or would not do it. The fact that your product is in sustain mode, that is less relevant to your company, doesn’t mean that the customer doesn’t expect you to communicate with them.

Your stakeholders still require you to be able to understand how to proceed with the product, and know if there’s any chance to revive it and make it successful again, or if instead it’s better to end its life.

Try to learn as much as you can about the background of your product, talk to your team and everybody else who might help you to build a complete picture of the product ecosystem in order to:

  • Communicate with customers in a coherent way, whatever you said in previous meetings and calls count. Don’t be afraid of communicating that your plan has changed, but it should stay coherent with what has been said before. If you cannot deliver a certain feature you should explain this clearly and give the customer as much context as possible.
  • Be able to understand the context of every inquiry. The worst thing for a product manager is to receive a question from a customer and not know why the question is asked.

Be honest and don’t be afraid to meet customers. In my case, it transpired that the real issue was simply that the customer was afraid they had lost a communication channel with us, and they were left without information on the product strategy and future plans. The customer had started to wonder if we were going to kill the product, which was a key component of their infrastructure, without discussing an exit strategy for them.

All Products die

Ending a product’s life requires a lot of research. It’s a tough decision to end a product’s life because there’s no turning round. If, six months or two years later, the market asks for exactly the same product you know what bad decision everyone will complain about.

So how do you inform this decision?

1. Do a Market Check Analysis

This should cover two main topics:

  • Where the market is going
  • What is the revenue/maintenance trend of the product

The first topic is about “what we are trying to solve with the product” and “why a customer would buy our product”. You have to know your market and match it with your product. How far are you from the market requirements?

Then look at your company revenues and maintenance trends. Why are your sales reps no longer selling the product? Talk to them and find out why they are convinced that your product is unsellable. What about maintenance? How many customers are still under maintenance? When will that maintenance agreement finish? Have your biggest customers already planned an exit strategy?

2. Plan the Exit Strategy

What will happen once the product is officially retired? Can you replace it with something else? These questions are really important because they can make the difference between a strong customer retention rate and a company that acts like it doesn’t care about its customer base.

As product manager, you are responsible not only for the product but also for the customers who use it. You have to plan a strategy, and wherever possible offer an alternative to your customer that will still solve the problem your product was supposed to solve.

If there’s no exit strategy then you have to explain this to your people – sales, sales engineers, support teams – and to your customers, because you want to retain them after the product is retired. It’s a tough job.

3. Rome was not Built in a day

Ask yourself if there is still a problem to solve. If the product you’re managing had infinite resources would you be able to make it successful? Be honest with yourself and don’t be blinded by the fact that you are the product manager.

Keep in mind that the problem you tried to address with your product may still there, but could be that the problem itself has evolved and requires a different approach. As product manager, you need to be able to recognise such changes, build a new business case, and envisage a new solution that may not necessarily be the product you own.

4. Be Prepared to Fight

Killing a product is a process, and every company has its own, but you have to be prepared to explain to all the stakeholders why you want to kill your product. Build a business case, do your analysis, be prepared to have many conversations with different teams: support, sales, developers, finance.

5. Don’t be in a Hurry

Killing a product requires the steps above to be carried out carefully. Don’t be in a hurry, but don’t be scared. Product management sometimes requires bold decisions. It’s about building amazing products but also about managing them from day one to the last day.

The post Take Care of the Misfit Toys: Managing End of Life Products appeared first on Mind the Product.

Posted on

Product Innovation: Is Your Product a Slow-Melting Ice Cube?

Product innovation can certainly be exciting and rewarding. And in today’s hyper-competitive and fast-changing business environment, innovation is not optional. It’s mission critical. Even well-established organizations with large market shares need to make innovation a priority. Not because it is fun, but because it can play a major role in a product’s survival in today’s market.

User demands and preferences change frequently. New competitors appear suddenly. Changing technologies make once-successful products less than optimal or even obsolete.

With threats like these more prevalent today than ever, product innovation is less of an offensive move. Yes, it is a chance to disrupt your industry and take a leadership position in your market, but lately it’s often a matter of playing defense and keeping your products in the game.

This post will help you spot some of the clues that your team might need to prioritize product innovation more than you have in the past. We’ll also offer a few ideas for pivoting your product if the threats you discover are serious enough to warrant that.

If you’re wondering whether your team needs to be innovating more, start with a question. Ask yourself, “Is our product a slow-melting ice cube?” A… what? We’ll explain.

Product Innovation: What Is a Slow-Melting Ice Cube?

Think of a slow-melting ice cube as a product or technology that faces an inevitable demise due to outside factors already in play. These factors won’t kill the product right away, which is why we call such a product a slow-melting ice cube and not a puddle of water. But they’re out there, like a fatal illness that’ll eventually be cited as the product’s cause of death. To put this into more concrete terms, here are a few real-world examples of slow-melting ice cubes:

· Online faxing
· Satellite radio
· Audio CD players
· Digital cameras

Digital Cameras: A Case Study of Failure to Innovate

Let’s take a look at digital cameras. In the early 2000s, these were among the most popular and successful consumer-electronics products in the world. The idea was revolutionary at the time. Virtually anyone could have a high-quality, highly portable camera that would allow them to take hundreds or even thousands of photos at a time. Plus, no more waiting for film to develop.

As it turned out, though, the digital camera was a slow-melting ice cube. In 2008, digital camera makers shipped 120 million units. But guess what else was just starting to disrupt the consumer-electronics market? The iPhone.

The camera industry never expressed much concern about the smartphone revolution, even though most phones had built-in digital cameras. And maybe they didn’t have reason to worry at first: digital camera sales continued increasing for a couple of years, peaking in 2010. But by 2017, the number of cameras shipped had fallen by about 80% from its peak.

The smartphone camera was out there, making inroads into the territory once controlled by the standalone digital camera. But it didn’t wipe out camera sales overnight. That’s why so few people in the industry took enough notice. That’s a classic slow-melting ice cube.

What Creates a Slow-Melting Ice Cube?

If you’re wondering what could turn your product into a slow-melting ice cube, or whether it might already be one, here are a few common causes.

1. The product isn’t built on much intellectual property.

Netflix is a great example of this phenomenon. Their original business model was renting DVDs through the mail.

But Netflix knew from the beginning that this model was a slow-melting ice cube. Today, Netflix runs on a proprietary system that would be near impossible to duplicate and execute on the same level. But at the beginning, the company would simply buy DVDs from studios and use a website and the US Postal Service. Not very innovative, right?

The company’s CEO said early on that Netflix would eventually need to pivot its business, because it would be too easy for a larger competitor to use the same model to compete with Netflix.

If your product isn’t built primarily on intellectual property, or a system you’ve developed that would be difficult and costly to replicate, you might have a slow-melting ice cube.

2. The product fails to address changing user trends or preferences.

Consider satellite radio. It’s an amazing and brilliant technology. Early satellite-radio players used satellite transponders orbiting 22,000 miles away to beam audio to our homes and cars.

But, again, smartphones and other mobile devices were also doing those things.

As innovative as this technology was, it was also a slow-melting ice cube. Radio listeners were increasingly uninterested in having a standalone radio (which the satellite systems required). They were also uninterested in radio programming since they could now listen to their own playlists on iPods and iPhones.

If your product is asking users to interact with it in ways they no longer prefer, you might have a slow-melting ice cube.

3. The product leverages an aging or outdated technology.

Online faxing has become a popular replacement for the old-fashioned analog fax machine. But the real question is: Given we have email and cloud-based file sharing, why do we still fax at all?

There are several reasons fax has not died yet, as most experts predicted it would long ago. Some laws and regulations still favor fax, mostly because they haven’t been updated to reflect the realities of secure email and file sharing. Also, many large businesses (in healthcare, financial services, and real estate, for example), have invested millions of dollars in their legacy fax infrastructures. They aren’t yet willing to drop all of that investment into the trash. So these businesses often insist that customers and vendors communicate with them via fax.

Online faxing— technology that allows a user to send or receive a fax by email or through a website—has emerged in recent decades. It makes faxing easier for individuals and businesses that don’t want to deal with fax hardware but still need fax capability. In fact, online fax companies market their solution as an easier way to deal with the frustrations of faxing.

The problem is, eventually fax will die and be replaced entirely with more modern forms of document transmission. Which means that even online faxing is a slow-melting ice cube. It survives only because the old-fashioned methods of faxing have proven to be the slowest slow-melting ice cubes in technology history.

So another question your team should ask is, “Is our product’s core technology at risk of being supplanted by something else?”

Product Innovation Strategies for Your Slow-Melting Ice Cube

Now, let’s say your product team takes an in-depth look at your product. You look at your users, your competitors, and the technology trends shaping your industry discover you have a potential slow-melting ice cube on your hands. Here are a few steps you might want to take.

1. Consider Pivoting Your Product

Yes, it sounds scary to pivot, to change your product’s strategic direction. But holding on tightly to your existing product and refusing to change should scare you even more. If your product is a slow-melting ice cube, that strategy will much more likely result in failure.

Besides, many of the world’s most successful companies owe their success to pivoting away from doomed product or business plans before it was too late. Starbucks did it. So did Twitter.

2. Try Disruptive Innovation on Your Own Product

According to the theory of disruptive innovation, larger, incumbent companies’ products can lose ground to newer and smaller competitors when those bigger players shift focus away from the lower end of their market. Meaning: the customers who are less demanding.

While the big company is continuously doing R&D for its most profitable customers and releasing new services just for that market segment, a smaller player can come in and offer a “good enough” solution that captures a big share of the industry that the larger player ignored. Eventually, if the smaller company is successful, its good-enough product becomes more than just good enough—and starts capturing market share from the big player.

If we turn this disruptive innovation theory around, we can see that the incumbent company is managing a slow-melting ice cube. Because that smaller player is out there, figuring out how to build a better product. And they’re starting with a slice of the market the big company doesn’t even care about losing.

The lesson for you? If you think you have a slow-melting ice cube on your hands, maybe you can try to disruptively innovate a competitive product yourself. Build a good-enough product to serve a specific need or desire of that segment of the market you might have been overlooking.

One way to deal with a slow-melting cube is to ensure it’s your own product team that makes the solution that will ultimately replace it.

3. Make Sure Your Product Innovation Solves a Real Problem for Real Customers

One final point: the answer to a slow-melting ice cube is not to innovate just for innovation’s sake. It might sound obvious, but many companies erroneously assume the solution to a fundamental problem is simply to do something different—or “innovative.”

But product innovation is a smart business strategy only if that innovation solves real problems. That means it comes from the difficult work of identifying a real problem or void in the market, developing a proposed solution to that problem, and then validating with users. Customer validation should confirm: 1) your solution does in fact solve their problem, and 2) they would be willing to pay for that solution.

In other words, when it’s time to address your ice cube with product innovation, you and your team first need to go through all of the steps you would with any product. Make sure you’re building a viable solution and not just blindly developing something new.

Innovation: The Answer to a Slow-Melting Ice Cube

In an ideal world, your company’s product would succeed in the market forever. Heck, you wouldn’t even need updates, bug fixes, or a customer support team.

But out here in the real world, even your most well-received and successful product is going to need continuous care and feeding. And eventually, some new technology or change in user behavior is going to make it a slow-melting ice cube.

When that happens, we recommend you try some of the strategies we’ve proposed here: pivot your product to meet the demands of the new landscape, go on the offensive and disruptively innovate your own product (before a competitor comes along and does it first), and follow all of the product-management best practices of validating your new product innovation before you start building it.

What about you? Any suggestions for dealing with a slow-melting ice cube? Please share them in the comments section.

The post Product Innovation: Is Your Product a Slow-Melting Ice Cube? appeared first on .

Posted on

Time to End-of-Life Your Product? Use This 10-Step Checklist

Almost all products eventually reach their natural end-of-life. So it becomes product’s job to take them through the phase-out or sunsetting process. The coroner’s report on a retired product might list any number of causes of death. But your typical end-of-life product reaches this point for a few reasons:

  • The product is no longer generating enough revenue to support the costs of maintaining it.
  • The company no longer wants to be in that specific market.
  • The company has developed a better solution.

Unfortunately, the scenarios above are never going to be as clear-cut in your organization as they appear in those sentences. An alarm bell won’t ding on your computer the moment one of your products stops generating enough revenue. And even if you do determine conclusively it’s time to sunset your product, the end-of-life process is complicated. Sunsetting products or features requires a lot of strategic planning to avoid disruption within your organization.

So, if you think it might be time to sunset one of your products or features, here’s a basic checklist to follow during the process. We’ve divided the end-of-life process up into three phases.

  • Phase 1: Deciding when to sunset a product
  • Phase 2: Getting buy in on your decision to end-of-life a product
  • Phase 3: Planning and communicating an end-of-life plan for a product

Phase 1: When is it time to end-of-life a product?

It would be ideal if there were an end-of-life algorithm for products, where you could simply plug in some numbers and—bang—out popped the correct answer. “Yes, it makes strategic sense to end-of-life this product.” (Or, “No, this product has another year of useful life.”)

Unfortunately, that algorithm doesn’t exist. And there is no simple formula to tell you definitively whether or not it’s time to retire your product. Knowing whether a product has reached its end-of-life is equal parts art and science.

That said, try to plug in as much science as possible. Start by doing an assessment of what the product is costing you, how much it’s earning, what the revenue trend looks like, etc. In other words, start this assessment with a few big questions.

1. How is the product performing right now?

Figure out how well the product has been selling over the recent past, and then step back and do a broader assessment to see the sales curve for the product over a longer timeframe.

If you chart this out and find a consistent downward curve for the product’s new customer acquisitions, seat licenses, maintenance agreements, or other revenue metrics that matter to your company, you might be right that it’s time to think about end-of-life.

Here’s something else you’ll want to add to the equation: To what degree is the product “in-flight” with your sales team? In other words, how many units of your product are listed on current sales invoices? And how many would your reps say they’re in the process of closing?

This should be factored into your decision because perhaps what you’re seeing is not a product whose useful life has ended, but simply one that’s been in a slump and could see a surge in revenue in the near-term.

2. How many development resources does the product consume?

Now that you have some idea of how the product is performing in terms of revenue generation and new-customer acquisition, it’s time to start measuring this against what it’s actually costing your organization to maintain the product.

First, you should investigate how many development hours your teams are devoting to this product. That goes for updates, patches, bug fixes, testing, and general maintenance. And then…

3. How much effort from support does the product require?

Next, you should do a similar investigation into how much the product in question is costing your company. Consider things like customer support time and resources.

It stands to reason that if your product is nearing end-of-life, it’s likely to have amassed more baggage than your newer solutions. That means the product might be responsible for a higher proportion of customer complaints and requests for help.

4. Calculate the value of the resources you could unlock by re-deploying these resources onto more profitable products.

Now that you have some broad data about your product’s dollar inflows and outflows, you can begin to think about resource reallocation. By retiring the product, you can redirect resources onto more profitable initiatives.

Remember, this is part art, part science. But if your intuition is telling you it’s time to end-of-life a product, these exercises above can help you infuse data into your decision.

5. Pro tip: Develop an end-of-life product roadmap.

You can build a roadmap specifically to strategically think through and map out your plan for taking your product through the end-of-life process.

If you have the right roadmapping app, you can use it not only to create the specific plan for your end-of-life product, but also to help you determine whether or not retiring the product is the right move in the first place.

That’s because this app will allow you to plug in all of the factors we’ve been discussing, and apply a weighted score to each one. This can help give you the full picture of how your end-of-life decision could benefit your organization (freed-up resources) or create risks (unhappy customers), and how much each of those factors should weigh on your decision.

Phase 2: Get approval for your end-of-life plan.

6. Discuss the issue with stakeholders.

Retiring a product is not product management’s call alone. This is an important strategic decision that could affect many other departments. Therefore it should involve other members of your organization, particularly your executive staff.

And now that you’ve done the work of building a case based on evidence—and not just your gut—you can take your data-supported proposal to end-of-life your product to your executive stakeholders.

By the way, by developing an end-of-life product roadmap and using a roadmap app that includes weighted-scoring capability, you’ll see some benefits when it comes to presentation. You can make your case much more effectively to executive stakeholders if you can bring up a clean, visual summary of your proposal and your strategic thinking behind it.

Phase 3: Plan and communicate your end-of-life plan.

7. Work with your sales team.

So you’ve persuaded your executive team to give you the go-ahead with your plan to end-of-life your product. Now you’ll need to discuss the issue with your sales team.

You’ll want to discuss how this will affect their sales presentations and help them find alternatives to steer prospects toward in the future.

8. Tell your existing customers.

Communicating with customers about a product phase-out is one of the most important steps in the end-of-life process. And, it’s a step many organizations get wrong. You want to give your customers plenty of warning. Don’t make them feel like the tool they’re using is being suddenly ripped out from under them.

You’ll also want to have alternative solutions to suggest to these users. Perhaps a swap or perhaps a newer and more robust alternative you’ve since developed.

Depending on the size of your organization and your user-base, it may make sense to establish formalized policies for end-of-life products. These can help set expectations for customers. Cisco, for example, went so far as to create an end of product lifecycle policy.

9. Coordinate with your marketing team.

You should also sit down with your marketing team and review marketing materials and messages. You want to see where the product you’re about to end-of-life appears, and how you can update those materials with other, more relevant solutions.

10. Consider where the freed-up resources should be reallocated.

Now that you have a sunsetting plan, you can start preparing to redeploy the resources and budget you will free up. Perhaps it may be a good time to cull technical debt by allocating some development cycles to refactoring efforts.

Sunsetting or retiring a product can be difficult. Perhaps even emotional, if you’re the product manager who brought it to market in the first place. But this is the cycle of life. The good news is if you handle the end-of-life process strategically, you’ll find you have extra capacity to make newer products more successful.

The post Time to End-of-Life Your Product? Use This 10-Step Checklist appeared first on .