This summer I did something that felt wrong: I deleted 60% of Beacon’s features.
How it started
One night I exported a year of usage logs and counted clicks per feature. The result was quiet. The bottom 60% of features, added together, made up less than 5% of all usage. I had spent a week or two building each of them, and every one was quietly eating maintenance time.
How I cut them
Deleting is harder than adding, so I set three rules:
- Hide the entry point first, keep the code. If nobody asks about it for two weeks, then I touch the code.
- Old users can always export their data. Removing a feature should never make someone feel abandoned.
- Write one sentence explaining each removal. If I can’t explain why, I haven’t thought it through, so it stays for now.
What happened next
Pages loaded twice as fast, support email dropped by a third, and the surprise was that renewals went up by two points. My theory is that the product finally looked like it was doing one thing.
There were regrets too. One customer wrote in asking where a small feature had gone, so I brought it back, just for him. That’s fine. The nice thing about being independent is that you’re allowed to change your mind for a single person.