EOL Process

Purpose

Run a product retirement end to end: decide whether to do it, align the people who can stop it, build the operational plan, ready the teams who will face customers, announce it, and close it out properly. Six phases with decision points between them.

The governing goal, and the sentence worth keeping in your head the whole way through: lose the product without losing the customer. Most of what follows exists to protect the second half of that sentence.

This is an orchestration skill. It doesn't replace the artifact skills, it tells you which one to reach for, when, and what has to be true before you move on.

Input

Works best with: The product being retired and where you currently are, considering it, decided, mid-plan, or already announced and struggling.

Also useful: Scale (customers, revenue, contracts), whether a replacement exists, and who already knows.

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 process opens by establishing what's being retired and where you are in it, then routes you to the right phase. If you're mid-sunset and something is going wrong, say so, the diagnostic in "Entering Mid-Stream" finds the skipped phase.

Example invocations:

• Run the full EOL process for our legacy reporting module, decision made, nothing else started.
• We announced a sunset three weeks ago and Support is drowning. What did we skip?

---

Key Concepts

The Six Phases