When to "kill your darlings"

How to know if you need to "kill your darlings"? 

We have all heard wisdom from the startup world like "fail fast, fail forward" or "the only thing that's constant is change itself". And while these sayings certainly sound good, they give little to no advice to knowing when it's time to change.

It is true - when building a business, change is inevitable. Making mistakes is inevitable. And there will be a moment in time where you as a business or product owner will come to the realisation that the idea that you believed to be true yesterday might not be a good idea going forward. So,... you will have to "kill your darlings" - meaning, change your opinion, retire a product or refocus your efforts in a different direction.

At Stagecast one of these big moments in our journey was when we realised that we do not need to build a mobile app. In fact, our customers did not want to have an app. And this realisation came at a moment when we had two native apps published in the app store and built our organisation to reflect that - with an Android and an iOS team. So, we scrapped the app, retrained some of our developers and started working on a web-app instead.

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There is nothing wrong with changing your mind!

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In fact, I would argue that in a word that is constantly changing around you, there is more wrong with never changing your mind. But how do you know when it's time to change your mind? 

This is a tricky one. Certainly, because every situation is different. But as a product owner you cannot afford to keep "too many darlings alive". So, we came up with a simple rule: If less than 80% of our customers profit from a feature or product, we will have to retire it.

Now, "retire" does not necessarily mean that the product had to be scrapped. It could also be "marginalised" and only be offered to a subset of our customer base. However, only if that would provide enough value to that customer base to keep it alive and justify the cost of maintenance.

This simple rule held everyone in the team accountable and provided a good base for discussion. It also helped to analyse what products to develop next. 

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