# Strategic Product Sunsetting and Portfolio Optimization

**Podcast:** All Things Product with Teresa and Petra
**Published:** 2026-03-10

## Transcript

Hi folks, this is All Things Product with Petra Ville and Teresa Torres.
And we're so happy you're here.
You told me that you decided to kill some of the things in your business that you consider mediocre.
I would love to hear more about that.
And why it is important to sometimes kill your darlings.
Yeah, this is a big one.
So I'm gonna start with like the general and then I'll apply it to the specific.
So we all hear things like you'll know you have product market fit when you have it.
When people buy it.
And I've heard this a million times in my career.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
But there I think there's this, this is something I experienced working at startups, and even in my own business, you might get some people buying something, and it might even like be stable, but it's not growing, or it's growing very slowly, right?
We have some of these terms like zombie companies where like they're stable enough, they have enough revenue to survive, but they're not really growing.
Um, I would say a cash cow is probably fine because it's bringing in a lot of cash, right?
But um I think there's this idea of uh we know that like we can try to convince ourselves we have product market fit because people are buying our product and it is they may even really like our product, but maybe we've maybe there's just not enough people like that.
So like the product is good, people are happy with the product, but it's just kind of limping along because our target market is too small, or the people that it resonates with is too small.
And I think like we start to get a signal that like, oh, people are buying this, it looks positive.
It may even grow for a little while, and then maybe something changes in the market and you lose that product market fit, or you never quite had that product market fit, you had some early fans.
And so, like, I think we all know this.
Like, we all know intuitively in our head, and like when we read things like you'll know you have product market fit when you have it.
For anybody who's worked at a company that was like a rocket ship, like you're growing so fast, everything is breaking, you can barely keep up.
Like, there's no question you have product market fit.
I think a lot of us have worked in organizations where that's not what we experienced.
We experience this more like it's a viable business, it's good.
But you're not, yeah.
Yeah, like you're surviving.
Um, but it's I think that's actually a harder situation where you have some success, but it's not necessarily meeting your goals or even meeting your customers' goals.
Like they could be happy with it, they're satisfied with it, but there's not enough of those customers.
Or it could still solve their problem enough.
Yeah, and it could still be hitting your goals, but keeping your engineering team way too busy.
So the effort to push it to dead level is way too high or something like that.
I think it's another scenario.
Yes.
And I think like what we forget in these situations.
So, like let's say we have a product that is performing okay.
You have customers, they're paying, they're satisfied with the product.
It's stable, but it's not growing.
And I'm reluctant about this growing terms because I think we also have this like unhealthy relationship with growth, and we think everything needs to be a rocket ship, and it's perfectly fine to have some stable products.
But like if you're building a product with the intent for growth and you're trying to expand your market and you're finding that growth is getting harder and harder.
You're not quite at that like sustaining growth point.
I think that's a really dangerous place to be because it seems like your product is working.
You're getting positive feedback, you're getting customers, you're getting revenue, but you're not getting it at the rate that you wanted.
And that's a it's really hard to cut that product.
But the problem is all the time that we spend on that product, we're not spending on experiments to find a product that could grow at the rate that we want and could satisfy our customers better.
And the reason why this is a topic for me right now is I've recently gone through this in my business.
I've had a number of products where my customers are extremely satisfied, where um they bring in revenue.
But either the either the market is too small, it's not quite the right fit, and while they've stabilized, they're not growing.
They're not quite having the impact I wanted them to have.
And it's really hard to say, okay, I should kill these.
But I'll tell you with this last year and like me doing my huge deep dive on AI and starting to build with AI, like I needed to make space for new things.
And suddenly that gave me this new lens looking at my product portfolio and being like, okay, well, these are interesting, they're bringing in revenue and they're getting good feedback, but they've stabilized.
They're not, they've stabilized in a bad way.
Like they're not growing anymore.
They're not declining necessarily, but they're not growing anymore.
They're not having the impact I wanted them to have.
So maybe I need to kill these to make room for what might be next.
And I think this is um the outliers are easy.
Like when we have crazy growth and we know we have product market fit, we're clearly keeping that product.
When we have no traction whatsoever, or very little traction and we're not profitable, we know we might need to kill that product.
But I think there's this middle ground product that's profitable, but maybe not enough, or maybe not growing, or maybe not worth the in the resources and the investment, even if it is profitable, because maybe it's barely profitable.
Yeah, but in product, or so I I totally agree with what you're saying.
I totally understand how in your business that is a decision to make.
What I observe in product organization, why it is sometimes way harder for product leaders or even product teams to think about that is because what I would call a dedicated standing team.
So looking at your and I, by the way, advise product teams.
So a product organization, in my coaching, I always have this task board uh structure that I suggest, and there is one column at the product overview taskboard, that's how I call it, that is called sunsetting, and that really helps teams having this conversation about okay, is there anything, a feature or even a product that needs to be in sunsetting because it is not as successful as we want it to be?
But oftentimes products cause team topology impact.
And if we want to decommission a product or kill a product, then it's this 12 people that need to be reallocated in the organization or sometimes.
So there is a bigger process to it, and that's why I like the sunsetting column, because then everybody knows okay, this product is not successful.
We need to at least start the con to have this conversation about can we put that people on a different discovery topic?
Should they continue this work?
Should we start conversations with them if they still enjoy this work on the product, or if they themselves think it's not longer viable to do so?
Or yeah, the bigger implications of that and bigger organizations, they're quite traumatic sometimes.
What do you think about that?
Yeah, I think it's obviously harder to make these decisions when there's teams involved, but I think the analogy is the same.
I think for me, I'm an individual person, I have a portfolio of products.
There's only so many times so many hours in the day.
Every hour I invest to a product that's sort of flatlined, takes away from my ability in investing in something that's new that could be better.
I think that's exactly the same for a company with a portfolio of products.
I have a portfolio of products.
Every product that is flatlining that is not continuing to meet the company's needs.
Sure, there might be a team on it.
I can take that team and put them in a new area that has more potential for growth.
And I think the challenge is here's why it's painful.
And it this was painful for me too.
Like this was not easy for me to do.
I want to be really clear about that.
These products are bringing in revenue.
Usually you cannot maintain them with no team.
So it's you're taking a revenue hit, you're betting on yourself.
You're basically saying, I'm gonna take this team off this product, we're gonna sunset it, we're gonna give up the revenue.
That's the hard part, because we believe there's a better opportunity out there, and we need to do the work to discover it.
And I think that's the pain.
People don't wanna take the short-term revenue hit to go search for the better revenue source.
Yeah, I I can totally relate because for product at heart, our leadership event, and I know we talked about that as well in one of the previous episodes, it was kind of a similar decision, right?
So the product leadership event always sold out with us even announcing speakers.
People, people just like like the event and they want to come and mingle with 60 other product leaders, the community is lovely, the setting is lovely, the venue is lovely.
So they always came.
But Arna and I had this constant feeling of there is more to do with this leadership event.
It's such it's such an amazing opportunity for people to be in a room with 59 other people in the exact same role than they are.
And putting all of them in an audience listening to speaker is maybe too much lost opportunity.
So we had this kind of okay, are we having the guts to redesign the entire event experience, not knowing if people will still like the event or if product leaders will be willing to invest two days instead of half a day to come to our event?
Is that too much of a time investment?
Of course, we have to charge more.
Do people think we are balllocks with the rate that we won't need to charge for a two-day leadership event, right?
So a lot of assumptions.
We had to, and we only do um some light-white interviewing and talk to people and peers and see what they would think about it.
So it's not that we have fired a structured discovery process around that, but we get some data points in, and then at some point it's just a leap of faith.
Should we pivot?
Should we keep it?
Do we playing safe?
Do we um do we want uh the challenge?
So yeah, I understand it's a hard decision to make.
What what did you decide to kill?
Do you want to reveal that?
Yeah, I've made a few of these decisions over the last couple of years.
So I have a Slack community for my course students.
A few years ago, we had opened this up to anybody who wanted to sign up and join.
So we had like a $19 a month membership.
And it was growing, it was doing really well, and it was not it was a reasonable revenue line for me.
There were a few problems with it.
I uh when somebody can pay $19 a month to join a community, like and ask a really lazy question, they don't put in any of the work.
So people would join the community and they'd be like, How do I conduct a customer interview?
And I'd be like, Well, have you read this article?
No.
Have you read the chapter?
No.
And it's like, I can't answer your question in a Slack community that took a whole chapter of a book to introduce the idea.
We have a whole five-week course to teach the skill, right?
And so we gave people this avenue where they didn't have to do any work, and I mean, not even reading a blog post, but they expected to learn the discovery habits.
This was very popular with consumers.
It was a growing community.
There was a lot of activity, I had a lot of subscribers, but it was starting to cannibalize my other products.
They didn't want to buy courses, they didn't want to read blog posts.
They literally wanted to show up, ask their questions.
And it wasn't just leaving you better than they've got happy customers.
I was miserable.
I hated it because I was like, I've written so much about this.
Can you take the first step yourself?
And I realized like I want to design products for people with agency.
And if you have no agency, sorry, good luck.
Um, and so I killed it.
And I really did kill it.
Like I cut off a pretty reasonable revenue stream almost overnight.
The way that I killed it was I killed my monthly subscriptions.
I moved it only annual.
And if you go to producttalk.org and you look at our subscriptions, to this day we only have annual subscriptions.
And this is limiting my growth.
I get email all the time from people saying I want a monthly subscription.
This is by design.
I want to work with the people who are willing to invest in themselves.
Understand it's gonna take more than 30 days to build your discovery habits.
And I know people want to try before they buy.
I get it.
I offer a lot of free content.
There's lots of ways to try my content before you buy it.
But I don't want people that come in and ask lazy questions.
I want people that are working the habits and genuinely need help.
So that's one, it literally cut a reasonable amount of revenue, but it led to much better, like it helped me have better alignment with who I want my audience to be.
Yeah.
And then this past year was a second example.
I just cut all of our deep dive courses.
So we talked about this on a past episode where I have our introductory course, and then we have our advanced courses.
And the format of our advanced courses, the challenges for our introductory course, we have a B2B product where companies buy it.
We run private cohorts for companies, and we have a direct-to-consumer product where people can sign up for our public courses.
Our introductory course has really great product market fit with both.
We we sell out all of our public cohorts.
We have a full schedule of private cohorts.
Our advanced courses were doing, was doing well with direct to consumer, but wasn't finding product market fit with companies.
And that's because the leader doesn't want to hear you have to take a six-week course and then you have to take a series of five-week courses.
They really believe you can train their team in one day.
So like this model was like just too far away from what they expected.
And direct to consumer, because we run cohort-based courses, you have to get your sales timing right, where everybody has to want to buy around the same time to have enough students to have a viable cohort.
And our direct-to-consumer business was pretty stable for years, but it wasn't growing.
And it meant we would have moments in time where it was hard to get enough students for a cohort to be viable.
And it led to really bad, a really bad situation.
We'd have to cancel a cohort, we'd have to refund people, it was costing us money.
Administratively, it was a nightmare.
Our students loved these courses, but we weren't getting enough of them because we couldn't figure out how to get the B2B part of it to supplement it.
Whereas on our introductory course, they reinforce each other.
We don't need our direct to consumer customers to fill our public cohorts because we have companies sending new employees to our public cohorts, and together they sell out.
Couldn't get that to work on the advanced courses.
Now I'm not killing all of that content.
I have two new experiments I'm running this year for how to offer that same same material in new formats.
For our direct to consumer business, we're doing on-demand courses.
For our corporate businesses, we're doing a subscription that allows leaders to coach their teams.
Yeah.
But I'm gonna tell you my deep dive courses were 40% of my revenue.
This wasn't an easy decision to make.
Yeah, no, that's not an easy decision.
Like I just cut off 40% of my revenue.
But I did it.
Yeah, I yeah, I did it because for year after year after year, I'm seeing the same problems.
They're not going away.
I have a product that is it's profitable, right?
And I had there's instructors involved here.
It's not like there were no employees involved, right?
So this wasn't a decision that just impacted me.
It impacted my instructors.
But I have a product that is flatlining, it's not growing, it's stable.
There's some dips sometimes that makes it not stable, but it was very profitable.
Um, but I want to make time and space for what's next and what's better product market fit for both direct to consumers and for B2B.
And the only way I'm gonna have time to do that is I gotta burn the ships.
Burn the ship stories.
Yeah, so we would strongly advise listeners to either add a sunsetting column to their product task boards or to have a burn the ship meeting.
The next one.
Yeah, okay.
Let's try to make this a little bit actionable.
Like I think what can we do to make these decisions easier?
Yeah.
I like your idea of like on a regular basis evaluate is there something we should be sunsetting?
A little remote.
That's I do this.
It's yeah, as part of my annual review, I always force myself to ask what's no longer growing, what's just limping along.
Like, how do I trade that out?
And like I don't have an answer yet.
I have a hundred experiments I'm running instead, right?
I removed that product to free up time for a hundred experiments.
And my bet is one of those experiments will outperform what I cut.
Yeah, right.
So I think the sunsetting is one part of it.
I think, yeah.
Yeah, I think there's this McKinsey model, the H1, H2, the horizon model that I like for this.
The horizon model is this idea of like you have three buckets.
So H1 is your current revenue lines, your your cash cows.
It's the stable or growing part of your business.
H2 is like the investments you're making today that in a year or two are gonna replace your H1s.
And then H3 is even further out.
It's your bigger, bolder bets that maybe like on a three to five year line timeline might replace your H1s.
And so I think like really thinking about your portfolio in these buckets.
Yeah.
So that when you do decide you have to sunset an H1, you already have experiments in your H2 that are ready to like graduate to your H1.
And it needs to be so the anti-organization need to understand that, and this high-level experimentation need to be in your DNA, because otherwise teams get super confused or frustrated or demotivated by maybe their product not making it.
So a team should not consider it as their failure if their product maybe didn't take off.
Maybe it is in some rare cases, but usually it's more bad timing, market not ready, assumptions not have been tested properly, maybe not even by the team that is currently working on it.
But I think there needs to be this culture in the organization that says, like, hey, if something is mediocre, if a product is not making the cut, then there is a process in place.
And it's not we dropping all these people just in a vacuum and they need to find where else they fit in in the future because we kind of killing the the product.
That should not be the case, right?
So I if if we look at the product leadership layer, I think I would strongly encourage product leaders to talk about that with the team every once in a while.
It can happen that your product gets retired.
It can happen that your product needs to pivot, and you still are on the team and on the job, I guess.
But it it can be that you need to work on a different um product every once in a while.
And that's just the reality of working on an organization.
But it's oftentimes not a thing.
People are so loyal to their team and to their teammates and to the product that they're working on that these conversations are really hard to have.
Yeah, I think I'm gonna build on this.
So I think the third thing we can do to help make this easier is that the team that is responsible for the product is probably not the right people to make this decision.
It has to happen one level up because this is a portfolio decision, it's not a per product decision.
Yeah.
Um, and then I think the fourth thing we can do to make these easier is we need to normalize all products, even wildly successful products, have a life cycle, and by definition, a life cycle has an ending, like it is normal to sunset products, and like that should be a part of the conversation.
Not that's exactly what it's building.
Yeah, you managed this product through the end of its life.
Yeah.
Because my deep dive courses were wildly, I'll tell you the COVID years, boom years for my deep dive courses, both on direct to consumer and on B2B, right?
But the market changes.
Yeah.
It does all the time.
That's fine.
So for me, I don't feel like those courses failed.
Those courses ran their course.
And now it's time to find them the product that matches today's market.
Yeah, or the channel or whatever.
I agree.
Yeah.
Thanks for bringing up this amazing challenge slash question, Teresa.
Yeah, I think it's a good one.
Thank you.