The product death cycle

This is a scary and powerful way to describe a product development pattern that I’ve seen first hand. There’s a lot of different scenarios to illustrate this concept—Shreyas Doshi outlines a good one here—but this is one recent example I’ve heard:

1. We have an idea for a feature—or sometimes the executive team has an idea for a feature.
2. We do some user research. We propose our solution to a few clients. We show them the shiny new prototypes. They like them.
3. We report back to the executive team: “Users like the feature!”
4. The feature is greenlit and implementation begins.
5. The feature launches. It is rarely used and has little effect.
6. We’ve come this far and we still think the feature could work, so we restart the whole cycle and do more iterations on the feature. Time goes by and we have accomplished nothing.

This is what the cycle looks like:

If you zoom in on the lifecycle of a single feature, here is what the cycle looks like. The X axis is time and the Y axis is whichever KPI was chosen for the particular feature:

This is closely related to the speed vs velocity concept: often, the most dangerous thing a product team can do is head in the wrong direction or build the wrong thing.

Some red flags that could be early indicators you’re heading toward (or already in) the death cycle:

• Your company starts having a larger and larger focus on “go to market”—even within the product org.
• There is a high emphasis placed on features. People talk about the business in terms of features, not problems. Everyone is highly solution-oriented, not problem-oriented.
• The people selling the product don’t feel confident that new features are going to help them.

The product death cycle is insidious: it takes a long time for the symptoms to manifest, which means it is difficult and slow to diagnose.

If you think you’re in it, how do you get out of the product death cycle? A big part is being aware of your own biases. If you can carefully distinguish things that you assume from things that you know, you are a lot less likely to fall into the product death cycle.

Part of this means walking the walk of user centric design, not just talking the talk. Deeply understanding a user need is a lot different than determining if a user “likes” a certain feature. User research is hard.

Another way to avoid sinking into this downward spiral is to make sure you are leveraging multiple frameworks. Does your product have the four fits? Does it have traction? Is it loved by some core audience? If you can leverage multiple different tools or thought frameworks and your feature seems to pass the test for each of them, you’re probably on the right path.