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Product Management

Sunsetting your products using AI

Could it be that somewhere around 80% of your revenue comes from only a few products in the business, supplemented by a long tail of products, which haven’t been through a thorough review in many years? 

Is the ever-growing demand for speed and innovation worsening the situation, as companies heavily focused their investments into new products, while failing to stay on top of what they had? 

If you’re struggling to sunset these products, you’re not alone. As part of a global research programme conducted by our Skyjed team, we discovered that many businesses had failed to see the warning signs that a product is in the sunset zone. 

Products lie at the heart of commercial success for a great many companies. Moreover, the operational costs and time associated with managing a broader product portfolio are enormous. Add in the complexity of overseeing that many products, and the strain on billing, IT and customer service, and it’s clear that it’s essential to exit products when they’ve run their course and no longer offer strategic or financial gains to a business.

So why were product managers effectively spending most of their time and energy focusing on new products and product launches, and failing to see the warning signs a product is heading into the sunset zone?

One of the apparent reasons that came out of our research was that many companies don’t have a pragmatic, disciplined tool to run the kind of product review which leads towards taking products out of a market. When they do, the process can take weeks and thus it’s too often deferred in favour of more immediate tasks which are nagging at your limited time. The focus on having to present the latest metrics at review meetings means that reviews that pull together the end-to-end proposition of a product to see the strengths, areas for improvement and bring potential disruption to the front of mind, get put further down a long list.

So we designed some super-smart software that test drives your product at any point in its lifecycle, delivering a comprehensive health check across over 40 different performance drivers - quickly and easily. A complete strategic review of a product takes hours instead of weeks. It was designed to assist in a full arching assessment of the drivers of a products’ vitality, a deviation from the regular product management review process, which typically looks backwards, not forwards, and often misses critical risk or opportunity drivers. 

Moreover,  early feedback from enterprise businesses adopting the Skyjed product management software for their product teams was that it assisted greatly in identifying products which were long overdue to be sunsetted. This, in turn, freed up the business to focus their resources instead on fewer products with more substantial performance, growth or strategic opportunities, to reduce their risk, and focus more on the future, not the past. 

If you’d like to see Skyjed and how it can be used to keep on top of your product portfolio, please request a demo, and we’ll be happy to assist.