Most product leaders are measured on what they launch. The harder, higher-signal skill is knowing what to kill and reallocating capital bets.

I am willing to kill a product on the launch pad if it does not align with customer needs and business vision. At a privately held global market leader in construction technology, I killed two product lines in four years. A $40M program I was hired to ship. A VR training simulation with a dedicated 7-person international development team. Each time, the capital freed up funded the products I knew would grow revenue and actually shipped. Every kill decision followed the same evaluation framework.

Why is killing products so hard?

Because sunk cost is emotional, not rational. A $40M investment has organizational gravity. People built careers on it. Vendors are contracted. The board approved it. The business case was approved before you arrived.

At the company, the $40M program was the mandate I was hired to execute. During a leadership transition, I gained access to engineering documentation that revealed the program was misaligned with market reality and customer needs. Within two months of gaining full visibility, I had diagnosed the problem. But diagnosing the problem and gaining organizational buy in to act on it are two entirely different challenges at a privately held, bootstrapped company with no outside funding or credit lines.

The question is never “should we have started this?” The question is “knowing what we know now, would we start this today?” If the answer is no, the only variable is how fast you can redirect the capital.

What is the Three-Axis Kill Test?

Every product under evaluation gets tested on three independent axes. All three must pass for the product to justify continued investment. If any single axis fails, the product needs restructuring. If two or more fail, it needs to die.

Axis 1: Can it sustain itself on standalone revenue?

Does this product generate enough recurring revenue to justify its cost of operation, development, and support? Training products, platform add-ons, and ecosystem plays often get a pass on this question because someone believes they “drive adoption” of the core product. That belief may be correct. But Axis 1 asks the standalone question first, because a product that can sustain itself on its own revenue never needs the pull-through argument. A product that cannot sustain itself needs pull-through to be provable, not assumed. That is what Axis 2 tests.

At the company, the VR training simulation product had been in market long enough to evaluate. I pulled the standalone recurring revenue against the fully-loaded cost of its dedicated 7-person development team based in India. The revenue did not cover the team, the infrastructure, or the licensing costs. Axis 1 failed. The immediate organizational response was “but it drives adoption of the core product.” That is exactly the claim Axis 2 exists to test.

If the product has been live for 18+ months and standalone revenue does not cover its fully-loaded cost, Axis 1 fails. The product may still earn its place through pull-through. Axis 2 determines whether that is real or wishful.

Axis 2: Does it create measurable pull-through on higher-margin products?

A product that fails Axis 1 is not automatically dead. Some products earn their place by making the core product easier to sell. A training simulation that compresses the learning curve, a configurator that reduces pre-sales engineering, a free tier that drives paid conversion. Pull-through is a legitimate business model. But “we think it helps” requires evidence. Measure attach rates, deal velocity, and conversion lift with and without the product in the sales motion.

For the VR product, the theory was that VR training would accelerate operator proficiency on the company’s core products, driving equipment sales. I tested the hypothesis against actual sales data. There was no measurable correlation between VR training deployment and equipment purchase velocity or volume. The product was a demo novelty, not a sales driver. Axis 2 failed.

If you cannot demonstrate a quantifiable lift on the products that actually generate margin, Axis 2 fails.

Axis 3: Is the modernization cost justified by the revenue trajectory?

Even a product with weak current revenue might deserve investment if the market is growing and the product can be modernized at a reasonable cost. But technology shifts can make this math impossible.

The VR product was built for tethered PC-based headsets. The market had moved decisively toward standalone devices (Meta Quest line). Modernizing meant a full platform rewrite: new rendering pipeline, new interaction model, new deployment infrastructure. I ran the cost analysis against the revenue the product was actually generating and the trajectory it was realistically on. The investment required to modernize for standalone VR exceeded any reasonable revenue projection on a three-year horizon. Axis 3 failed.

If the investment is not justified on a three-year horizon, Axis 3 fails.

The VR product failed all three axes. Standalone revenue: failing. Pull-through on core products: failing. Modernization ROI: negative. I killed the product line, reduced the dedicated 7-person development team in India (the India office continued operating for sales, repairs, and regional administration), and redirected the capital.

Applying the framework to the $40M kill

The $40M core replacement program failed a more fundamental test: market alignment. The program was building a product that did not match what the market needed. I documented the misalignment, built a structured evaluation methodology, presented it to the executive committee and ownership, and gained approval for the strategic redirect. At a bootstrapped company with no outside funding, every dollar of that $40M redirect was a dollar that had to fund something better.

Making the change was tough. Once I sold everyone on the decision, I was on point to communicate it to every stakeholder in the organization. People literally walked out of the building. The emotional weight of killing a program that multiple careers were built around cannot be underestimated. But the big bets we placed on ease-of-use and the future product stack brought everybody back around. The redirect funded what became the first new flagship product in a decade and the first all-new platform in nearly two decades. Launched across 100+ markets. The people who walked out came back because the replacement was worth building.

How do you build the case for a kill decision?

The analysis is the easy part. The hard part is organizational. Here is the sequence I have used across both kill decisions at the company:

Document the methodology before sharing the conclusion. I presented the three-axis framework to leadership as an evaluation methodology before revealing which product I was evaluating. The executive committee agreed the framework was sound. Then I applied it. When the conclusion was “kill the VR product,” it followed from a shared methodology, not from my opinion. This sequencing is critical. If you lead with the conclusion, the conversation becomes about defending a position. If you lead with the framework, the conversation becomes about evaluating data.

Separate the people from the product. When the VR product kill included the India-based development team reduction, the communication had to be precise. “Your role no longer exists because we are exiting this product line” is categorically different from “your performance was insufficient.” The first is a strategic decision about the product. The second is a judgment of the individual. Conflating them destroys trust across the entire organization, including among the people you are keeping.

Redirect the capital visibly. The kill is only half the story. The other half is where the freed capital goes. At the company, the redirected capital funded the flagship product launch, the AI platform, and the digital revenue platform. +137% digital subscription revenue year-over-year. Flagship launched across 100+ markets. When leadership can see the direct line from “capital freed” to “products shipped,” the narrative shifts.

When should you NOT use this framework?

The Three-Axis Kill Test is for products that have been in market long enough to generate data. It does not apply to products in discovery or early beta. Killing a product before it has had time to find product-market fit is a different failure mode, and a more common one. The framework assumes the product has had a fair chance and the data exists to evaluate it.

It also does not apply to compliance-driven or safety-critical products where the justification is regulatory rather than commercial. Some products exist because the law requires them. Their standalone revenue is irrelevant to the kill calculus. But even compliance products must support market access or product lines that generate revenue. A compliance capability that gates entry to a profitable market earns its place. A compliance capability attached to a market you are exiting does not.

The takeaway

Portfolio discipline is the most underleveraged skill in product leadership. Every company has at least one product that is consuming capital, attention, and team energy without justifying its existence. The Three-Axis Kill Test gives you a structured, defensible methodology for identifying those products and freeing the resources for things that actually grow the business.

Three axes. All three must pass. If two fail, the product dies. The capital goes somewhere better.

Technologies and standards referenced

  • VR/XR platforms (Meta Quest, tethered PC headsets)
  • Microsoft Azure with Stripe (SaaS payment infrastructure)
  • GDPR and CCPA (international data compliance)
  • FCC, CE, UKCA, CCC (hardware certification regimes)

About the author

Product executive. 15+ years building industrial AI platforms, B2B SaaS products, and connected smart device ecosystems in regulated industries across 100+ countries. Three portfolio turnarounds. Three org builds. Three times the methodology transferred, only the industries changed.

Nick builds at the hardware-software-data intersection. Industrial AI. Edge-to-cloud platforms. Workflow automation systems making 8,000+ decisions per workflow with zero cloud dependency. The career pattern: enter complex regulated environments, find the kill decisions others avoid, and redirect capital from legacy programs to products that ship and outlast him. The acquiring company kept his product. Threw away their own.

Most recently Head of Product at Digital Control Incorporated. Global product portfolio. Turnaround-to-growth. Previously at Zonar Systems, a subsidiary of $44B annual revenue Continental AG, leading a $70M connected device platform across three continents, and at Rehrig Pacific Company building an innovation function from scratch.

Leading global products and global teams as a Chief Product Officer, Head of Product, VP of Product for B2B and B2B2C companies for digital transformation and product growth leadership.

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