Skills

Eol Message

Write a right-sized EOL announcement, brief notice through full phased comms, with...

Install

npx skills add deanpeters/Product-Manager-Skills --skill eol-message -g -a claude-code -y
Category
Writing
Updated
20d ago
License
See repository
Context cost
Mediumabout 3,000 tokens
Runs scripts
No, instructions only

What it does

Write a right-sized EOL announcement, brief notice through full phased comms, with rationale, customer impact, and next steps. Use when retiring a product, feature, or plan.

EOL Message

Purpose

Craft a clear, empathetic End-of-Life (EOL) message that communicates discontinuation, explains the rationale, addresses customer impact, provides transition support, and positions what comes next. Use this to maintain customer trust during a difficult transition and reduce the churn that comes from customers feeling abandoned.

This is not a generic sunset announcement, it's a customer-centric communication that acknowledges loss while framing the change as progress. And it is sized to the change: a deprecated toggle gets a paragraph, a flagship retirement gets phased communications across months.

Input

Works best with: What's being retired (product, feature, or plan) and roughly when.

Also useful: The rationale, affected customer segments, migration or replacement path, support commitments, and any contract or regulatory language that constrains what you can say.

Anything supplied with the invocation itself, text after the skill name, a pasted context dump, or an appended ARGUMENTS: line, counts as answers already given. Use it and skip whatever it covers; don't re-ask.

Arriving empty-handed? That works too. The skill asks for the what/when/why and the landing place before drafting, then recommends a message size you can override. An EOL message without a stated rationale and a next step reads as abandonment, so those two get asked for either way.

Example invocations:

  • Draft an EOL message: retiring our legacy reporting module Dec 31, replaced by the new analytics dashboard; 400 accounts affected.
  • We're killing a feature nobody uses. Give me the brief version, no replacement, 3 weeks notice.

Key Concepts

Size the Message to the Change

The most common EOL messaging failure isn't tone, it's proportion. A six-section announcement for a deprecated checkbox trains customers to ignore your notices. A one-line notice for a product carrying real workflows creates a support incident.

Read the whole SKILL.md on GitHub

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