When people talk about Product Management, the vast majority of the time, it's all focused on how to bring new products to market. It's about how to prioritize new features. It's about the flashy and new. Trevor shared that if that's all you know about Product Management, you're only getting half the story. Yes, building new products is important and exciting, there's no denying that. However, it is just as important knowing how to sunset a product and how to clear out the old-growth to make room for the new. Trevor discussed how killing a product can result in more profits, but may actually result in more top line revenue.

1. How to Sunset Your Product by TaskTop
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7. Trevor Bruner
TONIGHT’S SPEAKER

8. Sunsetting Your Product

9. ● Who am I & why can I talk about this?
● Impediments
● Risk of not killing
● What are you doing now to ruin your life?
● Let me tell you what to do

10. Who am I?
● Senior Product Manager at Tasktop
● Product Owner for Tasktop Integration Hub
● Previous life:
○ Submarine officer
○ Drilling Engineer/Rig Supervisor
○ Financial Services

12. 20172007 2010
IBM Rational Lifecycle
Integration Adapter
(Standard Edition)
Eclipse IDE
client
Eclipse-based
integration engine
Purpose built
browser-based
integration engine

13. Why can I talk about this?
● Helped EOL the IBM RLIA SE
● Shut down Tasktop Dev
● Working on long term plan for Tasktop Sync

14. My Perspective
● On-premise software
● B2B
● Enterprise customers
● Enterprise partners
● A B2C, cloud-based offering may have different concerns

15. Why do you care about EOL?
● Not sexy or exciting
● Hard & ugly, but incredibly important
● Free up engineering time for new products/features
● Remove security threats
● Cut down on code rot
● Possible revenue opportunities
● Help company focus

17. End of “_______”
End of Life- generally when a company decides to no longer sell a product
End of Marketing- when the company decides to no longer market a product
End of Support- when the company no longer will support a product

18. Analogy

19. Analogy

20. You’re Making Your Life Suck
Incredible support terms
● i.e. 100 year lease options
● IBM supports for 8 years
Building custom solutions
● Now support dozens of products
● Not just one building any more…you’ve
got dozens
Poor testing strategy
● Poor testing now= lots of failures later
● Remember, it will be different
engineers working on this
● Changing a lightbulb shuts off water
External libraries
● You’ve got to use them, but you’re now
reliant on them
● Pre-fab cabinets…great when building, but
if need to replace...especially if that
company stops making them

21. Impediments
● Nostalgia
● Product is a cultural landmark of the company
● Effort required to even bring this up
● Only so much mental space on Mgmt team
● Staffing concerns
○ “You want me to expend more resources to tear this down?!?”
● Sales team
● Those pesky customers & what to do with them
○ Even people whose term is up soon won’t be happy
● Partners?
○ Like a sub-let. They can sell your stuff.

22. So Now What?

23. File for Permits
Get Management buy-in
● May involve lots of behind the scenes socialization
● Make the business case
● Show the value of the underlying property (the opportunity cost)
Get Legal buy-in
● Review contracts
● Need them on your side in case things go sideways

24. Stop Selling
● Typically don’t EOL if sales volume is high, but still…
● Don’t want to sell a unit and announce you’re evicting them in a year
● How to de-incentivize sales reps?
○ Hint: Sales doesn’t sell if they don’t get paid…
● Purchase portal?
○ Where can people purchase?
○ Only direct? Or on partner sites as well?

25. Cut down advertising/marketing budget
● Get Marketing on-board
○ Need to ensure company messaging is consistent
● Likely already onto next thing, but will need clean-up
○ Website
○ Other marketplace sites?

26. Engineering
Tenant removal plan?
● Do you need to add features to make migration to new product easier?
● Not a need if just going to kick them all out
Long term maintenance concerns
● Some tenants may have multi-year leases and you have to let them stay…
● What do you need to invest now so that you don’t have to pay attention for the term of the lease?
● Remove asbestos (i.e. troublesome libraries)
● Close down the pool (i.e. remove features)

27. Engineering
Beauty of software…
● Built it once & countless customers can use it
Curse of software
● If just one customer is entitled to it, you have to maintain entire code baase &
build infrastructure

28. How to make more money (from your old product)
● “Dead” products can be a great money maker
● Microfocus does it
○ 7th largest pure-play software company
● Two options:
○ Sell “move out support”. Help them migrate to their new home
○ Sell “extended leases”
If you product is so important that people can’t live without it, they’ll pay you more
to use it.

29. https://www.statista.com/statistics/726977/worldwide-micro-focus-revenue-by-year/

30. Announce EOL Internally
● Announce in a positive light
● You’ll immediately hear that you’ve destroyed a deal
● Important to do the upfront work so this isn’t a show-stopper

31. Announce EOL Externally
● May be less of an “announcement” than simply talking less
● Make sure you have messaging around the replacement

32. Celebrate
Celebrate internally
Be gracious
● Will be a tendency to talk bad about ‘that old thing’, but people put their blood,
sweat & tears into what you just killed

33. Next 6 months
● Stick to your guns
● You will inevitably be asked to sell it again
● Need to ensure you have gamed this out ahead of time

34. And then...
● It will slowly fade away
● No more new deals
● You’ll wish you had created a document outlining all the decisions in one
single location, but there were more important things going on
● Will still have some support requests
○ They may be simple, but they may be painful

35. Eventually
● Everyone's support terms have expired
● You can finally put your product to bed
● You’ll be spending almost all your time on other initiatives

36. Finally you’re done!
And now it’s time to kill the replacement product

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