So we have this product – an MVP from 2 years ago that never got the love it needed. The little social platform that never was, but with a rich set of profile and content creation tools. And then we built another product on top of those content creation tools with a divergent experience for front-end users. And now we’re about to deploy a third product that also uses those content creation tools, but even less than the one before.

In only 2 years, the time has come. It’s time to sunset the social experience. We’ll maintain the content creation tools, of course. Once we’re free of the social experience, we can transform those tools to more closely facilitate these two new products.

What a hard decision tho. Not only was it the first thing I launched at this company, but I feel it never got a fair shake at life. Priorities changed, teams were redirected, and now here we are – killing it off. I am disappointed and – if I’m honest – a little sad.

Logically, it’s the right choice. Once you get beyond the sunk cost fallacy, once you add up the cost of maintaining the social experience, once you look at the dwindling use and lack of traction, once you understand exactly how confusing these divergent experiences are for our users – the choice is clear and certain. We’ve drafted a phased plan to “unship” a feature, evaluate impact, and then decide whether to continue or not.

First feature redirects get shipped at the end of this sprint. While we’re not expecting any huge user backlash, I know that I, for one, will be sad to watch it all fade into the sunset.