Give your products an annual review
I spent the first half of my career as the product manager at a software company. Product teams are constantly reviewing their products, assessing: What do our customers want? What changes should we make? Do we (maybe) need to retire a product altogether because it no longer serves its purpose? Most solopreneurs don’t take the same approach. They continue to push the same products or services, or…
In the first half of their career, the author worked as a product manager at a software company. Here, product teams regularly evaluated their offerings, asking questions like what customers desired, possible changes, and even the possibility of retiring a product. However, for many solopreneurs, this kind of thorough review is not practiced. Instead, they continue offering the same products or adding new ones until they have a large suite of products to manage. Rarely do they remove anything.
The author now observes an annual review to ensure everything they publish aligns with their business goals and meets customer expectations. One common issue is the tendency to keep on adding without removing anything. While launching new offers is exciting and offers a sense of control, removing an offer can feel like a loss. Moreover, updating websites, slide decks, and email sequences associated with removed offers can be a cumbersome task. Over time, resources can become outdated or even obsolete due to evolving technology.
To address this, the author outlines several questions to ask about each offer:
1. Are customers buying it? This initial review starts with sales or bookings from the past year. Even if numbers are low, a closer examination might be necessary.
2. Does the author still enjoy the work associated with this offer?
3. What is the cost of maintaining this offer? This includes time spent updating information, supporting it, and promoting it, as well as any tool subscriptions tied to it.
4. Does the offer align with the direction of the business? This involves comparing the offer against a business road map and value statements.
The author uses AI like Claude to help with this process by conducting an initial comparison, which then becomes a checklist for a human review. The final decision on an underperforming offer could be:
- Refresh it: Update outdated content.
- Repackage or reprice it: Alter the offer in some way to make it more relevant.
- Re-promote it: Sometimes, an offer may just need more marketing effort.
- Retire it: Remove the offer completely, informing existing customers or clients if necessary.
Regardless of the path chosen, the first step is to allocate time for a review. This could be an annual event or added to a to-do list. The review process is separate from the actual implementation of the decision. The ultimate goal is to determine the next course of action for each product or service.
Written by urgent.news from Fast Company's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
