Retire the feature: what we learned removing a third of our product
In one year Tidewater's collaboration products removed more features than they added. Elena Petrova on how they chose, how customers reacted, and what it did to support and speed.
- Wednesday 9 June
- Day 1
- 14:30–15:10
- 40 minutes
- Studio
- First floor, river side
- Talk
- Intermediate
Products grow by addition. Every feature has a customer who asked for it, a team who built it and a reason to keep it. Removing one feels riskier than building three more, so almost nobody does it, and products slowly become harder to use, slower to change and more expensive to support.
In 2025 Elena’s teams at Tidewater did the opposite. They removed thirty-one features from the collaboration products, about a third of the surface, and added nine. Support requests fell by a third, median page load dropped by forty per cent, and the churn everyone feared never arrived.
Elena walks through how they decided what to retire, using usage data, support costs and a great many phone calls. She covers the customer emails that worked and the ones that did not, the internal politics of deleting a colleague’s project, and the two features they had to bring back.
What you will take away
- A scoring method for choosing which features to retire, and which to leave alone
- Templates for telling customers, with the wording that reduced complaints
- How to measure the effect of removing something, not only of adding it
