the product zombie apocalypse - productcamp portland 2016
TRANSCRIPT
Zombie Before & After• They were once living, thriving, growing products
• Now they’re undead, and they will kill you
• You must cross the ‘other Chasm’
2016
Have you seen these Zombies?Let’s Meet the Family
The ‘a few customers really love it’ Zombie
The ‘it’s not really costing us anything’ Zombie
The ‘it’s pure profit!’ Zombie
The ‘if we kill it, they will go elsewhere’ Zombie
Why the Apocalypse?
• All your energy goes into creation & launch
• Different organizations take ownership
• Organizational incentives: eg. take MSS vs. maintain
• Change is Hard, for customers and for You
• …
• …
2016
Your Weapons• Compelling Value of new offering!
– Must exceed the switching cost
• The ever-popular business case
– Team up with the CFO/Controller, not just
the sales force!
– Discover & assert the hidden costs
• Your roadmap
– show what’s coming and what’s going
• Whole Products, including migration
• A culture of change & constant
improvement – no surprises
• Customer Community
2016
They’re Killing You
• Not all revenue is good revenue
• Your real costs:
– Support
– Maintenance of Technical Debt
– Operational Costs
• Opportunity Costs
– How much is not accelerating your new product costing?
2016
Your Roadmap
• Explicitly show EoL products
• Plenty of warning
• Migration must be integral & ongoing
• Learn from Microsoft
– Clear end-of-support periods
– Options for extended-support subscriptions
– Stop investing in keeping zombies alive
2016
The business case to killSpending Category Units Qty Line Total
Product Mgmt: the time you personally spend managing
your legacy products
Dev/test: the time your sprint spends in keeping these
products maintained
Fire-fighting & defect resolution: the time spent
reproducing, root causing, fixing & deploying those fixes to
old products
Dev Infrastructure: the number of dev/test systems your
team has to maintain to cover all your product permutations
3rd-party costs: the money we spend on 3rd party
engineering and software licenses
Other
2016
Your Whole Product
Capabilities
Training
Help & Support
Adoption / Migration Tools
Community
2016
The Power of a Users group
You’re less likely to strand customers if you:
• Give away your last-gen knowledge base
• Give away older, still-useful support tools
• Enable them to self-support
2016
Zombie carrot & Stick
• Seducing customers with
special upgrade offers ‘just for
them’
• Understand & address
switching costs
• You won’t convert them all so
don’t have that as your goal
2016
Happy Hunting
• Compelling Value of new offering!
– Must exceed the switching cost
• The business case
– Team up with the CFO/Controller, not just
the sales force
– Discover & assert the hidden costs
• Your roadmap
– show what’s coming and going
• Whole Products
• A culture of change & constant
improvement – no surprises
• Customer Community
2016