As a product manager, it’s not always about launching new products and features. At times, we also need to make tough decisions and retire products that are no longer serving the needs of our customers or aligning with our business goals.
Product retirement can be a complex process that requires careful planning, communication, and execution. In product retirement at a university, we need to consider the impact on our customers – our students, staff and faculty as well as the organization and the market. In this article, we will explore the reasons for product retirement, the steps involved in the process at a university, and how to communicate the decision effectively to customers and stakeholders.
Reasons why products retire.
- Out with the old, in with the new: introducing the latest and greatest.
- Saying goodbye to make room for something better.
- Retirement time: making way for the next big thing.
- Time for a change: upgrading to the future.
- Farewell, old friend: the end of an era and the start of a new one.
Why retire Qualtrics at the university? We were supporting multiple schools, each with their own version (brand) of Qualtrics, which led to confusion, wasted staff time, and extra costs. To streamline the experience for all stakeholders and make our organization more efficient, we opted for a unified system contract. One system would allow account holders to share research surveys (especially between colleges and schools), secure their accounts being secure Azure login, and more. Find out how this move led to an improved customer experience and a stronger organization.
Retirement and Improvement Rolled into One. My Leadership in Retiring the Health Science Center Qualtrics System and the Process I Used and Recommend.
- Create a collaborate planning place – Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, or other shared space
- Identify the team or individual who will coordinate the retirement of the product
- Develop a Product Retirement Plan
As the assigned product manager, I worked closely with the Project Manager, who also served as the Communications Manager. At the project kickoff, I created a Microsoft Team collaborative space. The university’s license manger granted me admin access to both systems (in Qualtrics lingo a licensed system is call brand) so I could develop a plan in coordination with key IT colleagues and test out the customer experience for this change. The Project Manager developed the retirement timeline as well as identified and scheduled key customer communication dates. With a few years experience of retirements of academic technology products, I created a quick guide and chanted my mantra as I filled it in.
By the end of this change we want our customers to feel…
https://portal.prosci.com/
By the end of this change we want our customers to do…
In order to illustrate our situation, I conducted a user account analysis. Out of the 1,100 total accounts, 70 accounts showed they were never used, and only 962 accounts were active (excluding disabled and brand admin accounts). Surprisingly, 275 of these active accounts had zero surveys and responses. That left only 687 active accounts with at least one survey. The further ease the change to the account holders, I identified the super users and pre-created their accounts in the unified Qualtrics system. We knew not everyone would need or want a Qualtrics account but the super users would need one right away. This kept super users, mostly researchers, focus on their work instead of the technology change.
Armed with this critical data, we made a strategic decision to reach out to the 687 active accounts with our communication plan and inform them of the retirement. Additionally, I notified Academic Technology directors (our technology liaisons) at every college community affected by the change and adjusted the plan based on feedback.
However, Qualtrics wanted to charge a hefty migration fee to move all accounts and data from one brand to another. The fee exceeded our contract cost. Instead, we opted for a customer self-migration. I provided five virtual support sessions where customers could drop in at their choosing, recorded and published videos of the sessions, maintained an open chat for customer support dedicated to this change via Microsoft Teams, and developed new knowledge base articles to empower account holders to migrate their surveys on their own. For those who needed extra assistance, I organized support meetings and worked closely with researchers to guide them through the process of moving their surveys to the new unified Qualtrics system.
How can we evaluate the success of the product retirement? We tracked incidents and requests in the ITSM tool and noticed minimal missed deadlines with only a few customers requiring assistance. Additionally, there were no customer complaints about “not being told” this was happening. Our plan had accounted for potential migration delays, allowing two administrators to access the old brand and export data so it could be imported to the unified Qualtrics brand. Furthermore, we measured the success of the retirement by comparing the costs of maintaining versus retiring the product. By only migrating active accounts and encouraging deletion of unnecessary surveys, we achieved cost savings.