Amy Zima — Killing Products (Turing Fest 2018)

You spend months — sometimes years — building a new feature. Once it's shipped you celebrate, and move onto the next thing. But product development isn't exclusively new feature development. In this talk, Amy will draw on her experience killing products at high-scale businesses. You'll learn why product development teams should constantly evaluate their product portfolio, some techniques to help you always-be-evaluating, and some advice on how to gracefully deprecate your products.

Transcript

1. @amyzima Killing products
2. Building products is exhausting.
3. About me. Product Manager at Spotify. iOS & Android consumer experience
5. Why should I kill products?
8. Usability bloat?
9. Or necessary complexity?
10. Cost & value.
11. - Physical — storage, data processing Cost - Time — ongoing & unforeseen maintenance - Usability — confusing user flows - Strategic — part of the business’s portfolio
12. - Customer — does it add value for your users? Value - Strategic — does this help the business? is it a priority?
13. When should I kill a product?
14. It’s the end of a whole product’s life.
15. It’s a feature that’s past its sell-by date.
16. - It’s blocking a development that adds more value Decision points for deprecation - It’s a security risk - It’s no longer adding value - It’s confusing users - It has a bug that will take too much effort to fix Forced hand Inten- tional
17. Feature cost Feature value Kill Be wary The sweet spot Keep an eye on Framework — Evaluate your feature portfolio.
18. Feature name User value Maintenance Usage Strategic value
19. Feature name User value Maintenance Usage Strategic value Login High High High High
20. Feature name User value Maintenance Usage Strategic value Login High High High High Colour setting Medium Low Low Low
21. Feature name User value Maintenance Usage Strategic value Login High High High High Colour setting Medium Low Low Low Bookmarking Medium High Low Medium
22. Feature name User value Maintenance Usage Strategic value Login 1 3 1 1 Colour setting 2 3 3 3 Bookmarking 2 1 3 2 = 6 = 11 = 8
23. How should I kill a product?
24. 1. Get consensus internally.
25. 2. Pick a date, announce, and stick to it.
26. 3. Explain your decision to your users.
27. 4. Ask for feedback.
28. 5. Celebrate & mourn.
30. - Got internal consensus - Gave notice to users in the app - Provided instructions on how to save the web app to desktop - Asked for direct feedback in a blog post How we did it
31. • Always-be-evaluating • Rip off the band aid before it’s too late
 • Communicate, communicate, communicate
32. Thank you. @amyzima