When to Kill a Product Line (And How to Decide)
Knowing when to stop investing in a product line is one of the hardest and most consequential decisions a product leader makes. The signals are usually present long before the decision is made.
Every product organization has a product line — a feature set, a product, or a module — that probably should not exist in its current form. It is consuming engineering capacity that could be better spent. It is serving a customer segment that is not strategically important. It has never achieved the adoption that justified the original investment. But it is alive because killing it is hard.
Deciding to kill a product line is one of the most organizationally difficult decisions in product leadership. It requires confronting sunk cost bias, managing customer relationships through a transition, and overriding the natural organizational impulse to preserve what was built. It also requires building a decision framework robust enough to withstand the political pressure that will come from every direction.
Here is how to build that framework.
The Warning Signs
Most product line terminations that happen too late were foreshadowed by years of visible signals. Naming them explicitly helps product leaders act earlier:
Stagnant adoption despite investment: If a product line has been incrementally improved for 12–18 months and adoption has not materially grown, the problem is usually product-market fit, not execution. Additional investment is unlikely to solve a product-market fit problem.
A customer base that is shrinking or non-strategic: If the customers using the product line are churning at higher rates than the rest of the portfolio, or if they represent a segment that is not aligned with the company’s current go-to-market strategy, the product line may be serving a population the business is moving away from.
Competitive disadvantage that is not closeable: If a competitor has a structural advantage in this area — better data, deeper integrations, network effects, superior team capability — and the gap is widening rather than closing, continued investment is likely to produce permanent second-place performance rather than eventual competitive parity.
Disproportionate maintenance burden: If the product line consumes engineering capacity for maintenance and customer support that is significantly disproportionate to the revenue it generates or the strategic value it provides, it is dragging on the portfolio’s overall efficiency.
Team motivation degradation: If the engineers and PMs working on the product line are consistently less motivated than those working on other parts of the portfolio — because they can see the signals above and understand the trajectory — talent attrition and quality decline will compound the problem.
The Decision Framework
A defensible kill decision requires answering four questions with honesty:
1. Is there a path to competitive relevance?
Not “can we build a better product” — that is always theoretically possible. The question is: given our current resources, our team’s capabilities, and the competitive dynamics, is there a credible scenario in which this product line becomes genuinely competitive within 18 months?
If the honest answer is no — if achieving competitive parity would require investment that is not available, capabilities that would take years to build, or market conditions that are unlikely to materialize — then the kill question is legitimate.
2. What is the strategic value of the customer relationships this product line maintains?
Some product lines serve customers who are strategically important even if the product itself is not performing. If the product line is a gateway to customer relationships that support higher-value parts of the portfolio, its strategic value may exceed its direct value.
Conversely, if the product line is attracting a customer profile that is misaligned with the company’s strategic direction — price-sensitive segments when you are moving upmarket, non-enterprise customers when you are building an enterprise business — then maintaining the product line may actively work against the strategy.
3. What does killing it cost, and what does it free?
The cost side: customer churn (estimated revenue impact), customer transition assistance (support and migration investment), team disruption, and reputational impact.
The benefit side: engineering capacity freed for higher-value work, operational simplification, and focus dividend — the compound benefit of concentrated investment rather than distributed investment.
The cost-benefit calculation is often more favorable to killing than intuition suggests, because the ongoing cost of maintenance and the opportunity cost of the engineering capacity are chronically underweighted.
4. What are the alternatives to full termination?
Sometimes the right answer is not kill but transform: spin the product line out, find a partnership or acquisition that values it more highly than you do, or narrow the scope significantly (serve fewer customers, fewer features, lower investment) to match the value it actually creates.
Full termination is the right answer when none of the alternatives produce a better risk-adjusted outcome. It is not necessarily the starting point.
The Execution
Once the decision to kill or significantly reduce a product line is made, the execution requires three things:
Customer honesty with lead time: Customers who depend on a product line deserve early, clear communication about what is happening and when. Twelve months of notice is better than six. Six is better than three. The companies that manage product line terminations with least damage to their reputation are the ones that communicate earliest and most clearly.
Transition investment: If there are alternative solutions — competing products, migration paths, integration options — invest in helping customers find and move to them. This is not charity. It is the product of respecting the customer relationship enough to help them land well, which preserves the relationship and the reputation even after the direct business relationship ends.
Internal clarity on the rationale: Teams that built the product line deserve to understand why the decision was made. Not a spin — a genuine explanation of the strategic reasoning. Teams that understand the rationale trust the leadership team’s judgment. Teams that receive a vague announcement of a kill decision without explanation learn that product decisions are arbitrary.
The willingness to kill product lines that are not working — and to do it before the damage is severe — is one of the marks of mature product leadership. It requires confronting sunk cost bias, navigating organizational pressure, and making a call that is locally painful and globally correct.
The organizations that do it well move faster, focus better, and build more competitive products than the ones that sustain underperforming investments because nobody was willing to make the call.