Retire a feature on purpose — who still uses it, what it costs, a dated sunset, and a removal — instead of leaving it to rot on a flag. Use when usage is low, when two features do the same job, or before you build the replacement "alongside."
--- name: kill-a-feature category: business description: >- Retire a feature on purpose — who still uses it, what it costs, a dated sunset, and a removal — instead of leaving it to rot on a flag. Use when usage is low, when two features do the same job, or before you build the replacement "alongside." --- # Kill a Feature Shipping is celebrated. Stopping is treated as failure, so products accumulate rooms nobody enters, each with a test suite, a support path, and a salesperson who still demos it. A feature you will not invest in, will not explain, and will not staff is already dead. Leaving it up is how it keeps costing you without the honesty of a funeral. ## Decide with numbers, not mood Write four lines before anyone argues in a meeting: - **Who uses it, in the last full cycle** — not "someone might." Accounts, not pageviews. If you cannot count users, you cannot decide; instrument first. - **What it costs** — engineering time last quarter (bugs, keep-alive, incidents), support volume, and the opportunity: what you did not build. - **What it is for, in one sentence.** If two people write two sentences, you have two features sharing a name. Split the decision. - **What you will not do instead.** Killing without a named alternative (including "nothing, that job is not ours") is how it comes back as a rewrite next year. Low usage is not automatically a kill. A feature used by two customers who are 40% of revenue is a contract, not a candidate. Put *that* in the doc. The failure mode is pretending the two customers are "the long tail" because the UI looks empty. If usage is healthy and the team still hates it, you have a design or positioning problem, not a sunset. Do not use a kill to avoid a hard conversation about quality.
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