Graham McNicoll

Killing a feature you spent months (or years) building is one of the hardest calls in product. The team put in the work. It was on roadmap for months. Someone built a complex spec, and pushed for prioritization. Sitting in the room when the data says it did not move the needle is uncomfortable, and the instinct is to keep investing. Give it another quarter. Find a reason why the numbers are wrong, and why it should work. That is the sunk cost fallacy running your prioritization. I have watched design teams spend months on an interface that looked great, was based on real research, and actually hurt metrics when it shipped. The instinct was to deny the data and stop A/B testing. This is where ego meets data. In a healthy product culture, shutting down a feature is a result, not a failure. It's engineering time back, and a simpler product with one less thing to maintain. But that only works if being wrong is treated as a normal result of running experiments. Celebrate the learning without judgement on the idea. Want to talk about building that kind of culture? DM me.