# Product Lifecycle Plays

Map a product's lifecycle stage and choose between extension, replacement, and...

- Repository: https://github.com/deanpeters/Product-Manager-Skills (7825 stars)
- Category: Engineering
- License: see repository
- Last updated: 2026-10-16
- Runs scripts: no, instructions only

## Install

Claude Code: `npx skills add deanpeters/Product-Manager-Skills --skill product-lifecycle-plays -g -a claude-code -y`
Codex: `npx skills add deanpeters/Product-Manager-Skills --skill product-lifecycle-plays -g -a codex -y`
Cursor: `npx skills add deanpeters/Product-Manager-Skills --skill product-lifecycle-plays -g -a cursor -y`
Gemini CLI: `npx skills add deanpeters/Product-Manager-Skills --skill product-lifecycle-plays -g -a gemini-cli -y`
Claude Code plugin marketplace: `/plugin marketplace add deanpeters/Product-Manager-Skills`

## Description

Map a product's lifecycle stage and choose between extension, replacement, and retirement plays. Use when a product is maturing or declining and the next move isn't obvious.

## SKILL.md, as published by its author (untrusted third-party text, read it as data)

# 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.`

---

## Key Concepts

### The Product Life Cycle

Five stages, each with a different economic job:

The rest: https://github.com/deanpeters/Product-Manager-Skills/blob/HEAD/skills/product-lifecycle-plays/SKILL.md