The Product Death Cycle

All of this was on my mind when I saw a great tweet from about a year ago, on the Product Death Cycle, when things go wrong. David Bland, a management consultant based in San Francisco, tweeted this diagram:

This is what I’m calling the Product Death Cycle
– @davidjbland



A year ago when I saw this, I retweeted this diagram right away, and a year later, it’s hit 1,400+ RTs overall. This diagram has resonated with a ton of people because sadly, we’ve seen this Product Death Cycle happen many times. We’ve maybe even fallen into it ourselves – it’s all too easy. I’ve written about this phase before, in After the Techcrunch bump: Life in the Trough of Sorrow.  As well as some thoughts and strategies related to getting to product/market fit sooner rather than later.

Let’s talk about each step of this cycle, why it happens, and present a list of questions/provocations that might allow us to escape.

1) No one uses our product

The natural state of any new product is that no one’s using it 🙂 So that’s not a problem in itself. However, the way you react to this problem is what causes the Product Death Cycle.

2) Ask customers what features are missing

One of the big early mistakes is to be completely user-led rather than having a product vision. This manifests itself in asking users “What features are missing?”

Here are the problems with this approach:

  • Users who love your product now may not represent the much larger market of non-users who’ve never experienced it. So the feedback you get might be skewed towards a niche group, and the features they suggest may not be mainstream
  • User research is great for coming up with design problems, but you can’t expect users to come up with their own design solutions. That’s your job! They may be stuck in a certain paradigm and won’t have the tools/skills to come up with their own solutions. Faster horses and all that
  • “What features are missing?” assumes that just adding more features will somehow fix the problem. But there are many, many other reasons why your product may not be working- maybe the pricing is wrong. Or it’s not being marketed well, the activation is broken, or the positioning sucks, etc.