Unfortunately, I don’t have a Google Cloud product that I want to sunset, I am a huge fan of Google products as I trust in the privacy and information security that Google cloud offers. I always have peace of mind that I opted for privacy and a secure product experience. I am one of the users who enjoys technology innovation at personal and professional levels. As any Silicon Valley technology enthusiast, my husband and I trust in Google smart home products such as Nest doorbell, thermostat, security cameras, Yale lock and not to forget, I extensively worked with Apigee solution architects as one of the API providers for one of my FinTech projects at work.

Not to side track, I can definitely talk about why I would announce end of life for a specific product.

I continue to evaluate every product that I own with the following metrics, such as adoption, egnagement, revenue generation and monetization. For this discussion I will assume that as a PM I identified some of these not performing well, addressed these issues over a certain period however, the market did not respond well to those changes and the metrics kept declining.

Sunsetting a product is not an easy decision, specially when you have to consider the impact on existing customer base as well as the resources that are engaged in building and shipping the product. Here are some of the reasons I can think of when I will sunset a product.

1. Dropping Adoption/Engagement over time – Product does not sell in it’s category. Continuous decline in the usage trends after trying to salvage the product over a period of time, resulting in constant decline in the annual revenue and high customer churn.
2. Product Strategy- channel conflict due to changes in company’s strategy and partnerships that is resulting in loss of revenue for the business.
3. Versioning – comparing latest product versions with the prior versions, perform feature parity, discountinue older versions that are no longer used.