Product Management Tip: If Your Product’s a Turkey, Kill It!

Is your product or project a turkey? If so, kill it!

Not every product or project should see the light of day. Some, having seen the light of day, should wilt like vampires in sunlight and die a quick, well-deserved death. But how can you recognize products or projects that are turkeys?

Maybe It Was a Turkey in the First Place

Ideally, companies would be well-informed and rationally managed with clear and open internal and external communication so that turkeys would likely be killed at the idea stage. Unfortunately, many kinds of corporate dysfunction enable turkeys to take flight:

• If people feel they will be punished for criticizing a particular executive’s ideas, or if the executive routinely discourages or belittles input for others, people won’t speak out against bad ideas coming from that executive.
• If a company skips market research, it may not realize that there’s no need for the product or that the need is already well filled by existing solutions.
• If an executive who fears having their (bad) idea killed is able to cut other stakeholders out of the planning and review process, a bad idea may be able to achieve an effectively unstoppable internal momentum by getting too many people too emotionally committed to an idea (or to the fact that they’ve given it their support) based on too little data.
• If senior executives are in denial or thinking irrationally in other ways, they may ignore red flags and plunge ahead because they aren’t disciplining themselves to think and behave rationally. In particular, if executives let their ego get tangled up in their analysis, they may overestimate their own and their company’s capabilities and underestimate the capabilities of competitors.

Unfortunately, that’s not even close to a complete list of factors that can enable obviously bad ideas to evade critical scrutiny before they become funded and committed “priorities.” But it illustrates how personal and interpersonal dysfunction can express themselves in the form of a bad idea getting approval and resources.

The Implementation is a Turkey

There is no idea so good that a sufficiently screwed-up implementation can’t doom. We see this repeatedly in federal systems procurement. Updating our outdated air traffic control system has clearly been a good idea for the last three decades, but the Federal Aviation Administration once wasted about a billion dollars on a poorly-conceived, poorly executed attempt to do just that. Having the ability to control the flow of people across your own border if you wish to do so is also clearly a good idea, yet the Department of Homeland Security just wasted another billion dollars on a project to build an electronic border fence. Sometimes, a product or project just gets so fouled up that the poor implementation itself becomes a barrier impeding progress and it would cost more money to fix the existing implementation than it would to scrap it and start over.

If You’re Too Late to Market, You’re a Turkey

Even if an idea is good and the implementation is good, if the company misses its market window, the product may still wind up being a turkey. “Good and too late” is just a wordy synonym for “too late.”

Events Turned Your Product Into a Turkey

Founding a consumer video sharing site in early 2005 was a very good idea, especially if you founded it in February and your name was Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, or Jawed Karim. However, once Google purchased YouTube, the other consumer video sharing startups were faced with competing against one of the world’s largest, most-profitable companies on a product it was willing to give away for free and was able to subsidize through its enormous search advertising revenues. At that point, the prospects for the other video sharing sites for a lucrative exit immediately became very dim. You may have had a good idea, but if someone else puts together the pieces sooner or better or just gets luckier, the product may still wind up on a plate next to cranberry dressing.

Stop and Ask Yourself: Are We In a Quagmire?

In studying the justifications given over for America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, the authors of the so-called Pentagon Papers (properly, “United States–Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense”) noted that as justifications given earlier were invalidated, people came up with new justifications for continuing involvement. A similar problem can occur with a project within a company. Once a company has committed sufficient resources and prestige (through public announcements) to a project, it may plunge ahead beyond the point of negative returns because it doesn’t want to admit the project is a failure that should be killed.

To prevent this problem, periodically ask yourself whether a project is still justified by current realities, regardless of how much money or time has been spent on it so far. Don’t fall victim to the “sunk cost” fallacy. Even if you’ve sunk a lot of money into a project, if it’s a bad idea at this point (even only in 20/20 hindsight), it’s still a bad idea that should receive no further funding.

Reality-Check Questions for Detecting Turkeys In Your Midst

Ask yourself the following questions while you’re working on a project. The longer the project goes without shipping a product to customers, the more important it is to ask yourself the questions.

• Regardless of what we originally believed when starting the project, given what we know and the resources and competitive situation we have now, is the project still a good idea?
• Can the product achieve the goals it originally set out to accomplish?
• Does the project have enough resources to reach completion and get to market? If not, can it get the needed resources?
• Does the product have a realistic chance of succeeding in the marketplace after launch?
• Is the feedback from the early testers of the product validating the belief it’s a good product with a good future?
• Is there still a viable path to profitability for the product?

Killing a Turkey Quietly

I once took over a product management team and found out that the company had put together a custom internal application for tracking new feature requests. This was a separate application parallel to the off-the-shelf application that was still being used to track bugs. The original justification for the project was that the bug tracking system lacked the rich functionality necessary to adequately capture new feature requests and that therefore a separate system was necessary for new feature requests. I quickly discovered that the one-off project had significant bugs of its own and couldn’t execute some common queries to return lists of feature requests. Plus, tracking bugs and enhancement requests in separate systems was a bad idea because it meant you couldn’t use a single system to see all the work scheduled for a particular release. Nor did the company have additional budget to fix the outstanding bugs with the feature tracker. Nor did it seem to make sense for a small startup focused on other things to be investing in developing custom internal tools. So I killed the custom feature tracker, moved the 125 enhancement requests within it back into the bug tracking system, and didn’t look back. This was an easy decision to make since it was an internal project, and killing it had no customer or reputational impact.

Killing a Turkey Too Late

Microsoft Kin will remain the poster child for products that should have been cancelled before shipment until someone else has an equally obvious, equally high-profile embarrassment. (In this industry, that won’t take long.)

The project was apparently sprouting feathers early on. Rumors I have heard include: the original plan was to ship it based on the Windows Phone 7 operating system, but the launch date for Windows Phone 7 slipped forcing a switch to Windows CE; the team on Kin was then forced to reinvent on the CE platform a lot of features that come with Windows Phone 7; and the project was under-resourced, so originally-committed features were dropped in a fairly random and resource-driven rather than market-driven manner along the way, leading to a Swiss-cheese feature set unlikely to please the target audience.

There are probably many good explanations for how this project went wrong along the way. But there is no good explanation for such a major corporation launching a product with a full-on advertising campaign in theaters only to kill it six weeks later. If it was obvious to Microsoft six weeks after launch that the product was a turkey, why wasn’t it obvious to Microsoft two weeks before the launch? Or if it was obvious two weeks before the launch, why didn’t a responsible executive cancel it and spare Microsoft the expense of the launch and the accompanying embarrassment when it was abruptly and publicly killed after the launch? It’s difficult to explain this sequence of events without concluding that there were some major breakdowns of communication, planning, and rational decisionmaking within Microsoft.

Kill a turkey before it gets shipped. Or if a turkey manages to run out the door, kill it quickly as Microsoft did with the Kin. A turkey walking around and squabbling in the marketplace is still just … a turkey. Happy Thanksgiving!