Good Products Deserve to Die

You know what’s scarier than launching a new product?

Touching a successful one.

I’ve seen it again and again: A team builds something that works, really works. It grows, it scales, customers love it (or at least tolerate it), and the money starts rolling in. That’s when the fear sets in. A quiet, sneaky kind of fear that dresses itself up as “best practices,” quarterly targets, and “protecting the user experience.”

Translation? Nobody wants to mess it up. Nobody wants to be the person who broke the golden goose. So what do they do? They polish it. They tweak it. They squint at metrics and nudge buttons around. They add another step to the funnel. Maybe offer a discount bundle or a BOGO promo. Anything but change the thing itself.

I call this Product Paralysis.

It’s when a team becomes so attached to the success of a product that they forget why it was successful in the first place: because someone had the guts to build something bold and different. And now? Everyone’s afraid to lift a finger without 14 stakeholder meetings and a PowerPoint deck that says “synergy” three times.

You know what happens next. The experience starts to get squeezed like a tube of toothpaste on its last legs. The focus shifts from building to “optimizing.” Managers cling to their KPIs like life rafts. Customers—bless their hearts—start seeing more and more gray patterns instead of delightful moments. And nobody’s talking about the customer after they hit “Buy.” Because that would mean investing in, gasp, the post-purchase experience.

Look, I get it. Bonuses are on the line. Market share is on the line. The ghost of a viral TechCrunch article from 2021 is still haunting the product roadmap. But here’s the hard truth: If you’re not willing to break your own product, someone else will.

The best companies know this. Apple killed the iPod. Not because it stopped working, but because the iPhone was better. They regularly change hardware, software, even pricing strategies—not because it’s safe, but because it’s necessary.

Tesla? They keep iterating meaningfully, not just slapping on new rims and calling it innovation. And they don’t spend time building more “checkout optimization flows.” They’re building the future.

As a product builder for more than 30 years, I’ve been in those rooms. I’ve seen what happens when we play not to lose instead of playing to win.

And I can tell you this: the real thrill isn’t in protecting what you built—it’s in building the next thing that’s even better.

So if your team is stuck in product purgatory, too scared to touch the cash cow, do yourselves a favor: call me. I’ll help you respectfully kill it. And together, we’ll build the next one your customers didn’t even know they needed.

Your product had a good run.

Now let’s make something worth remembering.