Every product has a lifecycle. And every product manager, at some point in their career, will face one of the most emotionally challenging decisions in the profession: knowing when it’s time to let go, when it’s time to define a product sunset strategy.
Sunsetting a product isn’t admitting defeat – it’s demonstrating strategic maturity. Yet many organizations cling to declining products far longer than they should, draining resources that could fuel innovation elsewhere. Understanding when and how to retire a product gracefully is as important as knowing how to build one.
The Product Lifecycle Reality
Roman Pichler, author of Strategize: Product Strategy and Product Roadmap Practices for the Digital Age, provides a clear framework for understanding where products stand in their journey. He describes the decline stage as inevitable: “Even if you do a great job at looking after a mature product, one day it will enter the decline stage – the value it creates will start to decrease.”
Pichler uses Apple’s iPod as a compelling example. The product dominated its category and was a significant revenue source for years. But after reaching peak sales in 2008 and entering a prolonged decline, Apple retired the iPod Classic in 2014 and finally discontinued the entire product line in 2022. Even beloved, iconic products have a natural end.
Recognizing the Warning Signs
How do you know when a product has entered terminal decline rather than a temporary rough patch? Several indicators suggest it’s time to have the difficult conversation:
Declining usage and engagement. When active users drop month over month – not due to seasonal fluctuations but because customers are losing interest, finding alternatives, or churning out altogether – the writing is on the wall.
The support conversation shifts. As one analysis notes, “When customers stop asking how to use features and start questioning why the product still exists, that’s a strong indicator that the product’s relevance is fading.”
Technical debt outweighs new value. If your engineering team spends more time patching security issues and working around outdated architecture than building anything new, you’re in maintenance mode with diminishing returns.
Strategic misalignment. Sometimes a product becomes irrelevant to your company’s direction. As Pichler writes in Strategize: “It’s not only the strategy that shapes the tactics. The latter also influences the former. As you collect data about how people respond to your product, you learn more about the customer needs and how best to address them. This may require smaller strategy updates, but it could also result in bigger changes, such as pivoting or sun-setting your product.”
Negative ROI from product investments. When every new feature release costs more to build than the revenue it generates, the math becomes undeniable.
The Emotional Challenge: Falling Out of Love
One of the greatest obstacles to retiring a product is emotional attachment. Marty Cagan, founder of Silicon Valley Product Group and author of INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love, addresses this directly with his famous principle: “Fall in love with the problem, not with the solution.”
This advice cuts both ways. It guides product discovery, but it also illuminates why letting go is so hard. Teams who’ve invested years building a product naturally become attached to their solution. But if that solution no longer effectively addresses customer problems – or if those problems have evolved – attachment becomes a liability.
Cagan observes that “product people tend to fall in love with their ideas really quickly. And when they fall in love, they start, as they say, love is blind. And you start ignoring the reality, ignoring the feedback which is really detrimental in a product team.”
The same blindness that can derail product discovery can also prevent teams from seeing that a product has run its course.
The Strategic Framework for Decision-Making
Roman Pichler outlines two primary paths when a product reaches maturity and begins declining:
Option 1: Accept decline as the final stage. “You should not expect any changes to the product strategy at this point unless you decide to sell or license parts of the product, which will require you to adjust the business goals.”
Option 2: Attempt resurrection through repositioning. “Alternatively, you might want to attempt ‘resurrecting’ the asset by re-positioning it as a niche product. Take turntables, for example, which have staged a remarkable comeback after the entire product category had virtually become extinct.”
The choice between these options depends on several factors:
- Can you invest the time and money required to extend the lifecycle?
- How deep into decline is the product?
- What’s the health of the product’s codebase?
- Has the entire product category lost its relevance?
Pichler cautions that “if the product category your asset belongs to has lost its attractiveness, then revitalising the product will be difficult.” Sometimes the market has simply moved on.
Learning from the Graveyard
Pichler points to Google Buzz as an instructive example – “a social networking, microblogging, and messaging tool, which was taken off the market a year after its introduction in 2010 due to its lack of success.” Google’s willingness to quickly sunset products that don’t gain traction is legendary, and it’s enabled them to reallocate resources to more promising ventures.
The lesson isn’t that products should be killed at the first sign of trouble. It’s that organizations need clear criteria and the discipline to act on them. As Pichler notes, knowing where products are in their lifecycle “enables organisations to balance their portfolios, invest early enough in new offerings, and retire declining products.”
The Importance of Portfolio Thinking
Strong product organizations don’t think about individual products in isolation. They maintain a portfolio perspective, understanding that some products fund innovation while others represent future growth.
Marty Cagan emphasizes that the best product companies focus on outcomes rather than outputs. In EMPOWERED: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products, he and co-author Chris Jones describe truly empowered product teams as those “assigned problems to solve, rather than given lists of features to build.”
When a product no longer effectively solves problems worth solving, continuing to build features is output without outcome – the definition of waste.
Making the Call
The decision to kill a product should be data-driven but not purely mechanical. Consider:
Financial metrics. Revenue trends, profit margins, customer acquisition costs, and lifetime value all matter. But don’t just look at absolute numbers – examine trajectories and comparisons to opportunity costs.
Strategic fit. Does this product align with where your company is headed? Does it serve your target market? Does it strengthen or dilute your brand?
Resource reallocation. What could your team accomplish if freed from maintaining a declining product? Often the opportunity cost of not sunsetting is enormous – and it can be made concrete. Deciding when to sunset a product is, at its core, a Cost of Delay question in reverse: every month a declining product stays alive carries its own quantifiable cost.
Customer impact. Who still depends on this product? Can they be migrated to alternatives? What’s your obligation to them?
As Pichler writes in Strategize, “To put it differently, with the right data you have a chance to successfully argue against the opinion and views of powerful stakeholders; without data, it may be difficult, and the HiPPO – the highest-paid person’s opinion – may win.”
Sunsetting with Grace
If you’ve decided to retire a product, execution matters enormously. A botched sunset can damage customer relationships and brand reputation. Best practices include:
- Communicate early and clearly with affected customers
- Provide migration paths to alternatives
- Honor existing commitments and contracts
- Give customers adequate time to transition
- Document lessons learned for future products
The Courage to Let Go
Perhaps the most important insight from both Cagan and Pichler is that product management requires courage. Courage to validate ideas rigorously. Courage to pivot when the data demands it. And courage to end things when they’re no longer serving customers or the business.
As Pichler notes in Strategize: “Eliminating the right features requires a solid understanding of your target group and the problem your product solves – as well as a good portion of courage. It’s always easier to create a me-too product than to create something different.”
The same courage applies to entire products. It’s always easier to keep something limping along than to make the hard call to end it.
Every sunset creates a sunrise. The resources, energy, and attention freed by retiring a declining product can fuel the next innovation – the next product that customers will love. That’s not failure. That’s the natural rhythm of building things that matter.
References for Product Sunset Strategy
- Cagan, Marty. INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love. Wiley, 2018.
- Cagan, Marty and Chris Jones. EMPOWERED: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products. Wiley, 2020.
- Pichler, Roman. Strategize: Product Strategy and Product Roadmap Practices for the Digital Age. Pichler Consulting, 2016 (2nd edition 2022).
- Pichler, Roman. “The Product Strategy and the Product Life Cycle.” romanpichler.com, November 2024.
- Pichler, Roman. “Strategic Options for Mature Products.” romanpichler.com, July 2024.
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