Product Lifecycle Plays

Purpose

Decide what to do with a product that has stopped growing. There are three plays, extend, replace, retire, and picking the wrong one is expensive in a different way each time. This skill gives you the stage diagnosis, the criteria that discriminate the plays, and the hazard register for the one that goes wrong most often.

Most teams skip straight to a play. Someone says "let's rebuild it" or "let's kill it," and the argument that follows is about the answer rather than the diagnosis. The diagnosis is the work.

Input

Works best with: The product or product line, and the signal that prompted the question, flattening revenue, rising support costs, a competitor move, a strategy shift.

Also useful: Revenue and margin trend, customer counts and concentration, support load, what else in the portfolio is adjacent, and how much investment appetite exists.

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. Bring the product name and a hunch. The stage diagnosis runs off the transition questions below, which are answerable from what a PM already knows without pulling a report.

Example invocations:

• Revenue on our reporting module has been flat for six quarters, extend, replace, or retire?
• Run the play worksheet across our four aging SKUs.

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Key Concepts

The Product Life Cycle

Five stages, each with a different economic job: