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# Kill the Product Nobody Would Miss
- URL: https://www.zilck.com/kill-the-product-nobody-would-miss/
- Published: 2026-10-15T23:16:32.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-15T23:16:32.000Z
- Description: Two in five product shutdowns get no public reaction at all — which means a lot of what your business keeps running is costing you attention nobody would notice losing.
- Author: Zilck Team
- Tags: Productivity

When researchers looked at roughly 360 product and service shutdowns over nearly two decades, about two in five produced no measurable public reaction at all. And of the shutdowns people did notice, only about a third drew a negative response, [according to new analysis in Harvard Business Review](https://hbr.org/2026/10/managers-need-to-get-better-at-killing-digital-products?ref=zilck.com) by Evan Shellshear, a principal at BCG X.

In other words, the backlash most managers fear when they consider retiring something is often imaginary. Silence is the most common outcome.

That should change how you look at every app, service tier, newsletter, report, and side offering your business keeps alive out of habit. The question isn’t whether shutting it down will cause trouble. It’s whether anyone would notice.

## The Skill Nobody Practices

Shellshear’s piece makes a pointed observation: knowing when and how to end a product is one of management's weakest muscles. In a 2019 global study of more than 1,600 product managers, product end-of-life ranked last among 15 core product-management skills, and building an effective end-of-life plan came in second-to-last among 74 measured capabilities, [HBR reports](https://hbr.org/2026/10/managers-need-to-get-better-at-killing-digital-products?ref=zilck.com).

That gap makes sense. Launches get celebrated; retirements get postponed. Nobody gets promoted for turning something off.

But the cost of not deciding accumulates quietly. Every live product needs maintenance, support answers, security updates, billing, documentation and someone’s mental bandwidth — whether or not it earns its keep.

## The Clutter Is Measurable

The pattern shows up clearly in software, where usage can be counted. Pendo, the product-analytics firm, found that roughly [80% of features in a typical cloud software product are rarely or never used](https://wraltechwire.com/2020/01/28/pendo-study-with-80-of-features-not-used-software-execs-re-evaluating-success-metrics/?ref=zilck.com), and estimated that public cloud companies had sunk up to [$29.5 billion in R&D into features that went unadopted or underused](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/pendo-data-suggests-29-5-billion-in-global-cloud-rd-investment-squandered-when-software-features-go-unused-300789477.html?ref=zilck.com).

The same thing happens on the buying side. Zylo’s [2026 SaaS Management Index](https://zylo.com/news/2026-saas-management-index?ref=zilck.com), drawn from more than 40 million software licenses, puts median SaaS spend at $9,455 per employee — and finds an average of 36% of licenses going unused against recommended utilization levels. Seventy-eight percent of IT leaders reported unexpected consumption or AI-pricing charges in the past year, and 61% had to cut projects because of unplanned software cost increases.

[“AI is quickly becoming the most expensive ‘invisible worker’ in the organization,”](https://zylo.com/news/2026-saas-management-index?ref=zilck.com) says Ben Pippenger, Zylo’s co-founder. The tools are multiplying faster than anyone is pruning them.

For a small business, the numbers are smaller, and the effect is the same: a dozen subscriptions nobody audits, a service line that sells twice a year, a monthly report nobody opens, a second Instagram account, a product SKU that exists because it always has.

## Notice First, Anger Second

Shellshear’s framework works because it splits one fuzzy fear into two questions: [“Will anyone notice the shutdown, and, if they do, will they be angry?”](https://hbr.org/2026/10/managers-need-to-get-better-at-killing-digital-products?ref=zilck.com)

Those questions have different answers, and different fixes. Whether people notice depends largely on how visibly you announce the change. Whether they’re upset depends on who you leave behind—and, [his research suggests](https://hbr.org/2026/10/managers-need-to-get-better-at-killing-digital-products?ref=zilck.com), declining products often retain a small, intensely loyal group that is far more likely to protest than the broader user base.

That reframes the work. You don’t need a big apology campaign. You need to identify the handful of people who genuinely depend on the thing and take care of them directly.

The [HBR piece’s recommendations](https://hbr.org/2026/10/managers-need-to-get-better-at-killing-digital-products?ref=zilck.com) follow from that: scale the shutdown effort to how visible the closure will be, concentrate resources on moving the most attached customers to an alternative, be open about the reason, and treat the retirement as a way to free resources for what’s working.

### What This Means

Run a “would anyone notice” audit once a quarter. It takes an afternoon.

- **List everything you keep alive.** Products, service tiers, subscriptions, recurring reports, social channels, newsletters, internal tools, standing meetings. If it takes effort to maintain, put it on the list.
- **Score each item on the two questions.** Would anyone outside the team notice if it disappeared next month? If so, who, and how much would it hurt them? Be specific: name the customers, not “some users.”
- **Retire the silent ones without ceremony.** If the honest answer is that nobody would notice, cancel it, archive it, or stop doing it. [Two in five shutdowns go unnoticed](https://hbr.org/2026/10/managers-need-to-get-better-at-killing-digital-products?ref=zilck.com); many of yours will too.
- **Handle the loyal few personally.** For anything with a small, attached group, contact them before you announce anything. Offer a migration, a discount on an alternative, or simply an explanation. A direct call to ten customers costs less than a public relaunch.
- **Reassign the freed hours on purpose.** The point isn’t austerity. It’s to move time and money toward the products people would fight to keep.

Most businesses don’t fail from the projects they kill. They stall from the ones they never got around to ending. The fastest productivity gain on your list may be something you simply stop doing.