How to Know If You Should Fix or Kill Your Product by CNN Sr PM
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Main takeaways: - When it's time to let go (how to sunset your product when it no longer is working) - Ways of evaluating whether it's time to pivot or kill a product - How to communicate to your users why that feature/product is no longer working (if there was adoption) and how to take the learnings of your failed product into the next project you're working on
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How to Know If You Should Fix or Kill Your Product by CNN Sr PM
- 1. www.productschool.com How to Know If You Should Fix or Kill Your Product by CNN Sr PM
- 2. Join 40,000+ Product Managers on Free Resources Discover great job opportunities Job Portal prdct.school/PSJobPortalprdct.school/events-slack
- 3. CERTIFICATES Your Product Management Certificate Path Product Leadership Certificate™ Full Stack Product Management Certificate™ Product Management Certificate™ 20 HOURS40 HOURS40 HOURS
- 4. Corporate Training Level up your team’s Product Management skills
- 5. Stephanie Musat T O N I G H T ’ S S P E A K E R
- 6. PIVOT, MARRY, KILL THE PRODUCT SCHOOL SEPTEMBER 4, 2019
- 7. DATE, MARRY, KILL - CHRIS EDITION 7
- 8. DATE, MARRY, KILL - CHRIS EDITION 8 DATE KILL MARRY
- 9. PIVOT, MARRY, KILL - BUSINESS VALUE PROP 9 Be More Productive at Work with Less Effort The Smartest Way to Get Around No More Sleepless Nights
- 10. PIVOT, MARRY, KILL - 2019 IPO EDITION 10 WeWork IPO Revolutionize your workspace Valuation - $47B AirBnb IPO Book unique places to stay and things to do. Valuation - $35B Peloton IPO Game-changing cardio comes home Valuation - $4B
- 11. Value prioritization based on subjective and objective measurements
- 12. Hello! I AM STEPHANIE MUSAT SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER, CNN DIGITAL You can find me at @SDMUSAT 12
- 14. LET’S START WITH THE BEGINNING1 14
- 15. Build the Right Thing 15 Build the Thing Right
- 17. YOU’RE IN GOOD COMPANY! 17 Hardware Apps Feature Sets
- 19. “ 19 "You shouldn’t be afraid of failure – when something fails, you think, ‘What did I learn from that experience? I can do better next time.’ Then kill that project and move on to the next. Niklas Zennström Skype, Kazaa
- 21. Killing products should be part of your practice.
- 22. Evaluation Pivot - Strategy play The feature/product is attractive but isn’t isn’t meeting expectations within the market. Marry- All is good The feature/product is meeting expectations with how it should be performing Kill - Features/functionality The feature/product is no longer meeting baseline metrics. 22
- 23. ASK YOURSELF: - Is the cost of maintenance proportional to usage? - Is there a better way to do this to get the results? - Is it promoting the wrong user behavior? - Who is going to be impacted, and what’s their value? - Is it supporting your business value proposition? - Is it stopping you from doing something else? - Are your competitors offering something better? - Does it support your north star goals? - Can you defend the decision to keep to executives? 23
- 24. PRODUCT KILL LIFECYCLE 24 INTRODUCTION GROWTH MATURITY DECLINE Try often, kill often Pivot to test traction Kill to make room Kill what’s left behind
- 25. VALIDATION Ask your users what they use. Ask your users what they don’t use. Ask your users what they like better in other tools. Don’t ask your users if they will use something that doesn’t exist in some form yet. 25
- 26. “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” 21 -Michael Porter, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance
- 27. Data Reality Numbers don’t lie. If you aren’t meeting your benchmarks, how can you achieve business growth otherwise? Product Market Fit Is the market ready to fully accept your product? Is your product primed for the market? COMES DOWN TO TWO THINGS 27
- 28. KTLO
- 29. PLAY PIVOT, MARRY, KILL 1. List out all stats on your product - User data - Tech debt - Revenue - Cost of Maintenance - Impact on other features - Age - Competition 2. Bucket it based on metric baselines 3. Look at the synthesis of it - whichever bucket has the highest value (with lowest effort) wins. 29
- 30. PIVOT IF YOU CAN: 1. Define potential based on user value 2. Tell compelling and unique narrative 3. Outline revenue streams 4. Ladder up directly to OKRs Next steps: Begin product discovery Prototype ideas Validate with users OUTCOME 30
- 31. RI-PPP3 31
- 32. 3 P’s to Product Deprecation Planning Peace Perspective 32
- 33. 33 By killing off this feature you can: 1. - Allocate resources to better projects 2. - Refocus on user needs 3. - Eliminate dependencies on old technology 4. - Move faster 5. - Bring more joy Admit risks and temper expectations with timing. PERSPECTIVE
- 34. 1. Cold Turkey Turn it off, never look back. 3. Advance Notice Tell users in advance, gauge reactions. 2. Wean Test it out on a proportion of users, measure impact. 34 PLANNING
- 35. Document What Happened Keep it real, include supporting artifacts. Circulate Learnings Tell everyone, spread your gospel, prevent others’ mistakes. Use OKRs as Guiding Lights Explain how this feature didn’t match OKRs, outline what you’re doing to support them. PEACE 35
- 36. 36
- 37. Recap4 37
- 38. FOUR TAKEAWAYS - Killing is not taboo, it’s necessary for your product to grow. - Justify your decisions with data and market value. - Constantly question if the feature is bringing you, your team and your users joy. - Document everything, learn from it, let it go. 38
- 39. Thanks! ANY QUESTIONS? You can find me at @sdmusat sdmusat@gmail.com 39
- 40. CREDITS Special thanks to all the people who made and released these awesome resources for free: ◦ Presentation template by SlidesCarnival ◦ Photographs by Unsplash 40
- 41. www.productschool.com Part-time Product Management Training Courses and Corporate Training
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- Tonight's talk is “ [TITLE] ” with [NAME]. Welcome, [NAME].
- Hi everyone! Let’s get started. I’ll introduce myself in a minute but I’m hoping everyone can take a minute and go back in time with me - let’s aim for high school. I know for some that might not be the most pleasant memory. But back in my day, we didn’t have phones, we had to socialize in person with our friends, and we entertained ourselves with Cosmo quizzes, MASH and Date, Marry Kill.
- Well for the sake of this presentation we’ll keep it PG but we called it something else… OK so for those who may dont know what I’m talking about - you get three people. Celebrities, crushes, teachers etc. And you have to choose one to date, one to marry, and one to kill. So here we go - we’ve got the Chrises - Hemsworth, Pratt, Evans.
- Since we’re all technologists here, figured we do the same for some current company’s business value propositions - what do we think?
- How about some IPOs? What do we think? So it’s kind of amazing to think that these childish games we used to play (or maybe still do) are actually exercises in prioritization. So it seems to me that I’ve been training to do product since I was a teen and I’m going to try to pitch to you how using Date, Marry, Kill is a powerful arsenal in your product toolbelt as you’re evaluating the next stage in your product’s life cycle.
- So it’s kind of amazing to think that these childish games we used to play (or maybe still do) are actually exercises in prioritization. So it seems to me that I’ve been training to do product since I was a teen and I’m going to try to pitch to you how using Date, Marry, Kill is a powerful arsenal in your product toolbelt as you’re evaluating the next stage in your product’s life cycle.
- So quick intro about me - I’m Stephanie Musat and I’ve been doing product for the past eight years, primarily in the media space, currently at CNN on our digital news platforms and services group, previously at Refinery29, Complex and others. And that much experience in media makes me incredibly qualified to talk about killing products. The media industry is equally volatile and reactive. In my career I’ve built and killed products around the pivot to video, Messenger bots, Snapchat, Facebook Watch, Apple News, Facebook Instant. You get the picture. So i’m going to spend the rest of the time walking you through some of the questions I ask myself, the process I go through, the drinks as me and my team determine whether it’s worth it to pivot our product or kill it.
- There seems to be two groups of PMs and their philosophies around killing products - some love it and some hate it. I was texting with a friend about this before tonight and she said verbatim “love to murder products” So obviously killing, murder etc. sounds more intense than it is - what I’m hoping you walk away from by the end of the night is that there’s no taboo about killing off features and products. In fact it’s 100% necessary if you want your products to grow and mature.
- Without going too far into product 101, let’s talk about some product fundamentals to levelset how and where this process can fit.
- To me, product has two main responsibilities - build the right thing. We do this by talking to our users, using data to create compelling stories, evaluating our business bottom line and somewhat reading people’s minds and predicting the future for what they are going to want to use next. Build the thing right - we need the right kind of functionality for the user to accomplish their goal easily, without tension, maybe even joyfully. It’s one thing to say they can do it - another to say they love doing it. We’re aiming for the love part.
- So at every step in the product lifecycle we’re looking at ways to defend the user, to validate their needs, to introduce new features that will bring value, loyalty, dependency on us, while getting rid of the stuff that’s holding us back. In my opinion, the opportunity to kill or pivot happens at every step of the way.
- I know I use the term Kill a lot - you can use sunset, deprecate, sending your product to a farm upstate… but you’re in good company! The top tech companies have all tried, failed, pivoted and/or killed products when they’ve decided the effort to maintain is more laborious, expensive, detrimental to the user experience than keeping the product alive.
- 152 dead Google products in total: 129 services, 11 apps, and 2 hardware products. That’s a lot for a 21-year-old firm!
- Normalize it. Circulate it on your teams, make sure people are aware that it’s not only a possibility, that it’s reality. I have a friend who’s a PM at a large tech organization who said he aims to kill one thing per sprint. I don’t work on a product that has that much functionality nor a high performing enough team to churn out enough things to kill at that frequency, but that’s the expectation he set with his team to normalize the idea that killing products is not an admission of failure - instead it allows for room for further innovation and development on the core pieces his audience loves.
- So I’ve said pivot, marry, kill about 100 times already but let’s put some baseline definitions to this - Pivot is when there’s something attractive but not totally working. Pivot IS NOT a extension of your core feature sets or something totally different with the same branding. At a previous company, we used the same name for three different products. That’s not a pivot. Marry is you’re chugging along. Kill is it’s time to let go.
- As often as you are looking at your roadmap, you should be looking at your product set and evaluating whether it’s serving your OKRs (tends to be quarterly.) You’re going to ask yourself some of these questions. If you have good answers to most, then keep on keeping on. If any of these questions make you pause, it may be time to reevaluate whether your current offering satisfy your needs.
- Depending on where your product is in the lifecycle, it should look something like this. There’s opportunity to pivot or kill at any point. In fact, if I plotted out where most of that happens, it should happen at the beginning stages where you are constantly validating ideas with your users. Only the successful ones should get to the growth stages.
- Validation is key. If you aren’t validating, you’re inserting your own bias and assumptions into your product builds, so you’re building for yourself, not for your core audiences. Ask them what they think of your current offerings. Show them prototypes. In my experience, don’t ask them about something you don’t have a wireframe or prototype yet. Users are very good at talking about the ideal state of something (yeah of course I’ll use that!) but when it comes to reality, it may not work.
- More is not necessarily better. More dilutes the value of your product. The strategy for your product growth needs to focus on the things that are focusing on growth, revenue, etc. Everything else is just filler.
- Keep the Lights On - some people like this approach - to build other things while keeping the other things running. I dont agree with that. I think it ends up building complexities and dependencies while upping costs. As much as you can manage, try to avoid it.
- Remember, pivot is an expansion of your ideas or a change in direction for the features you’re offering. It’s not a total scrap and rebuild. So if you are able to see potential in the users you’ve cultivated, a direct line to OKRs as defined by your company, it may be worth thinking through pivoting. Pivoting required the same product discovery and solution framing you would do at the beginning of a product idea, but with even more care because you already have developed a relationship with customers through the existing experience and want to be careful about disrupting their usage. To me, pivots are pretty risky and rarely successful. If you are doing constant iterations and validating with your users, you should never hit the point of having to pivot. If you are at a point where you need to consider changing strategies drastically, there had to be a massive swing in the market, technology or other space that required alternate thinking.
- Perspective - Now that you dont have to take care of this thing that isn’t helping you, what can you do? You’re essentially Marie Kondoing your product - what brings you joy, what will bring your users joy, what don’t you have to support anymore that made you sad. Be real about it and admit risks but ultimately this is a time to reflect on what possibilities and opportunities there are for your product now.
- Depending on your kind of business you’ll employ one of these three techniques - since I work in mainly B2C I tend to do cold turkey and turn off features. If it’s a really big feature, I’d consider weaning users off it to track data. I have a friend in B2B who has to do advance notice since she has clients that pay for certain feature sets so they need to know what’s changing and what will replace that piece of functionality if necessary.
- Use this space as a reflection of what you learned from both a technology side and a user side. Users didnt know what to do next, the value prop got dilute by bigger companies, the cost of entry was too high - whatever the reason may be and circulate it. Make sure everyone knows the real reason to prevent someone else’s mistakes - or even your own. I once started working on a product that I thought was a great idea that looked eerily similar to one I killed about two years before. Reorient yourself to why you are there. There are goals set that are intended to guide you to success. Use them as jumpstart points to start thinking critically about what you need to offer.
- Feel free to speak with me and I can point you in the right direction (explain where to apply). Or you can visit www.productschool.com Have a good night!