Kill Your Darlings

What It Covers

Teresa Torres and Petra Ville examine when to discontinue stable but stagnant products, using Teresa's decision to cut 40% of her revenue by sunsetting deep-dive courses and a $19/month Slack community, and introduce the McKinsey Horizon model as a portfolio management framework for product teams.

Key Questions Answered

• •The Flatline Trap: A product generating revenue but showing zero growth is more dangerous than a failing product, because it consumes team resources while masking the absence of true product-market fit. Teams mistake stability for success, preventing investment in higher-potential experiments. Sustained flatline growth is the signal to begin sunsetting conversations, not reassurance.
• •McKinsey Horizon Model for Portfolio Decisions: Structure your product portfolio into three buckets: H1 covers current revenue lines, H2 covers investments maturing within one to two years to replace H1, and H3 covers three-to-five-year bets. When sunsetting an H1 product, H2 experiments should already be ready to graduate, preventing revenue gaps and reactive decision-making.
• •Sunsetting Column in Product Reviews: Add a dedicated sunsetting column to your product portfolio board. Reviewing it regularly — Teresa does this annually — forces the explicit question of what is no longer growing. This structures the conversation before a crisis forces it, giving teams time to reallocate people and plan transitions rather than react under pressure.
• •Portfolio Decisions Belong One Level Up: The team managing a product is not the right group to decide whether it should be retired. Sunsetting is a portfolio-level decision requiring a broader view of resource allocation and strategic fit. Product leaders must own this conversation, removing the emotional conflict of interest that makes individual teams resistant to discontinuing their own work.
• •Selective Customer Design via Pricing Structure: Teresa eliminated monthly subscriptions entirely, moving to annual-only memberships at producttalk.org to filter out low-commitment users who asked surface-level questions without engaging with existing content. This deliberately limits growth but improves customer quality and alignment. Pricing structure can function as a customer selection mechanism, not just a revenue lever.