Tips for retiring digital products
“Everything has an end”
Geoffrey Chaucer, 1374
In the life cycle of every digital product there comes a time when its fortunes start to fade. When the star that once shone brightly starts to dim. Retiring a product can be difficult, can be painful even, but holding on too long can be a drain on resources, can lead to customer dissatisfaction and can take important effort away from new products. If you’re faced with retiring a product (also known as sunsetting) or are thinking about whether it’s time to do so, here are some tips to consider.
Know when it’s time to retire a product
Organisations can become very attached to their products. In some ways they are like their children. This perhaps explains why so many will keep some products going, even though they should have retired them a long time ago.
Retiring a product can be painful, but keeping a poorly performing product going, or one that is a significant drain on resources can be even more painful in the long run. Here are some signs that it might be time to retire a product:
- The product is in terminal decline. Long-term sales are dropping, with no sign of improving.
- The product is not profitable and is unlikely to be profitable in the long term.
- The product is a significant drain on resources, with poor ROI for those resources being utilised.
- The product doesn’t fit with the organisational strategy. For example, the strategy is to focus on a different market.
- The product uses legacy technology that is difficult to develop and support.
- The product has been surpassed by competitors and making it competitive would require too much resource.
- Regulatory changes mean that the product is no longer viable.
Check the data
Even though there might be signs that it’s time to retire a product, it’s important to check the data before doing anything too hasty. Retiring a product is a decision that should be made with the head, not with the heart. Make sure that you’re confident in your data. Are your sales figures accurate? Do you have a good idea of the true development and support costs for the product?
Check the customers affected
It’s important to not only look at how many customers would be affected if a product is retired, but who those customers are as well. For example, you might have a product that is used by relatively few customers, but those customers are extremely important to the organisation. This can certainly be the case for B2B and enterprise tools.
Some important questions to consider are:
- How many customers would be impacted if we retire a product?
- How important are they?
- What other products have they purchased?
- What is their lifetime value to the organisation?
Don’t keep a product in decline on life support
Rather than retiring a product in terminal decline, many organisations will instead keep it on life support. They will do the bare minimum to be able to continue to sell and support the product. Whilst this might seem like a good option, in the long-term it can be damaging for an organisation, and for its customers.
For an organisation a product on life support can take resources away from more important products. For customers, a product on life-support can not only dilute the product portfolio, but it can also lead to significant dissatisfaction. In this day and age, customers expect products to be frequently updated and this is obviously not going to be the case for a product on life support.
Intent check with stakeholders
If you’ve come to the conclusion that now is the right time to retire a product, the first thing to do is to intent check that option with stakeholders within the organisation, such as sales, marketing and engineering.
This is not only an opportunity to share your intentions with stakeholders, but to also check any key assumptions you’ve made. For example, sales might tell you that whilst we don’t sell much of a product, it’s vital for getting the foot in the door with customers. Perhaps now is not the right time to retire it after all.
Speak to customers of the product
In addition to an internal intent check, it’s a good idea to speak with customers of the product you’re thinking of retiring. Rather than asking them what their reaction to the product no longer being available / supported would be (see Why the user is not always right for why this sort of question is best avoided), find out how they currently use the product and what alternatives could work for them. By understanding their context, you can better understand the impact that retiring the product would have for them, and for other customers like them.
Plan out the retirement customer journey
If you’re planning on retiring a product, everyone will want to know what the plan is, including timelines. It’s therefore important to plan out what the retirement customer journey should be so that you can share plans internally, and with customers.
Working backwards from product retirement make a list of the activities that will need to take place. You can then map these in chronological order. Some useful questions to ask are:
- What support agreements are in place?
- What customer messaging will be required?
- What will need to happen to customer data?
- When will alternative options be available?
- Which internal processes will be affected?
Give customers lots of notice
Retiring a product can take many months, if not years, especially for B2B products where they might be long-term support agreements in place. By giving customers as much notice as possible they can start to plan their options.
Be open with customers
If you’re retiring a product, it’s important that customers are not only aware of this but are also aware of why the product is being retired. Outlining these reasons, be they a change in organisational strategy, technical challenges, or market changes, helps with buy-in as customers can understand that the product retirement is a considered decision.
Provide customers with an alternative
Where possible it’s important to provide customers of a product being retired with an alternative, ideally in the form of a comparable product. If you don’t have an alternative available, at least provide customers with some recommendations for other solutions they could utilise. It might also be necessary to incentivise customers to switch to an alternative product, such as by offering a discount.
Allow customers to migrate their data
If you’re retiring a product, you will need to think about what happens to customer data and how customers can access their data. If customers are moving to a different product, you don’t want them to have to start from scratch, so it’s also important that they can easily migrate their data.
Stick to your guns
A number of years ago Microsoft announced that after 12 years they would stop supporting their Windows XP operating system. Even though this decision was met with uproar from customers still using Windows XP, Microsoft went ahead with the product retirement. As they outlined in their communications, they wanted to invest their resources in supporting more recent technologies.
Customers don’t like change and retiring a product will always be met with some resistance. However, unless you’ve seriously mis-read the situation, it’s important to stick to your guns, just as Microsoft did.
Carry out a post-mortem
Whilst new products are born every day, it’s less common for products to be retired. It’s therefore important to carry out a post-mortem (a post-retirement-mortem if you will) to identify lessons learnt. Some useful questions to ask are:
- What went well?
- What could have gone better?
- What are the lessons for next time?
- What would we do differently next time?
Conclusion
Retiring a digital product is never an easy decision, but it can be a necessary one. By recognising when a product has reached the end of its lifecycle, gathering data, engaging with stakeholders and planning a thoughtful customer journey, organisations can make the process smoother for themselves and for their customers.
See also
Image credits
Sunset photo by Melissa Cassar on Unsplash
Video call photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
Design Sprint workshop with the team of Design Sprint Ltd
Originally published at https://www.uxforthemasses.com on March 13, 2025.
