AI Summary
→ 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 INSIGHTS - **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. → NOTABLE MOMENT Teresa revealed she cut 40% of her total revenue by discontinuing her deep-dive course line — a product that was profitable and had instructor dependencies. Her reasoning was that years of recurring operational problems and flat growth signaled the market had shifted, making space for new experiments the only viable path forward. 💼 SPONSORS None detected 🏷️ Product Market Fit, Portfolio Management, Product Sunsetting, Revenue Strategy, Team Topology