Products don't die from too few features; they bloat to death from too many. Every feature you keep is a tax — on maintenance, support, onboarding, and the clarity of what the product is. Pruning is a discipline, not a failure.
The pruning framework
- Measure real usage. Features used by a tiny fraction of users, rarely, are candidates regardless of how attached the team is.
- Weigh the carrying cost. Maintenance, bugs, support load, and cognitive clutter all count against a feature, not just its build cost.
- Sunset gracefully. Communicate, migrate the few who depend on it, then remove. Silent removal burns trust.
- Default to no. Make adding a feature harder than keeping the product simple.
Bottom line: maintain a kill list and use it — a focused product that does less, better, beats a bloated one that does everything poorly.