Tell me about a time you had to shut down a legacy feature vocal users still liked.

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Anonymous · Accepted Answer

so this was back when I was at commerceiq, we had this old CSV export feature
that a small group of power users absolutely swore by. like they had entire
workflows built around it, some of them had been using it for 4+ years.

the problem was it was running on a legacy data pipeline that we were
sunsetting. keeping it alive meant maintaining two separate data layers
basically forever and that wasn't happening.

how I handled the deprecation:

* sent an early heads up 3 months before, explained why we were doing it

* set up a few calls with the loudest users to understand their actual
   workflows

* built a migration guide for the new export format

* gave a 30 day extension to two enterprise accounts who genuinely needed more
   time

the calls were honestly the most useful part. one user i talked to, she was a
data analyst at a mid sized retailer, and her whole monday morning report was
built on top of this thing. we ended up realizing the new export was actually
missing a field she needed, a subcategory column, and we added it before the
cutoff. that wouldn't have happened if we'd just sent emails.

where it got hard:

* there was a vocal guy on our community forum who posted like three times a
   week about it. never got on a call, just vented publicly. that's hard to
   manage because you can't really win that one

* internal stakeholders kept asking "can't we just keep it" and the answer was
   no but explaining the technical debt reasoning to non technical people takes
   a lot of repating yourself

the thing I'd do differently is probably communicate the "why" better upfront. I
think we explained what was changing but not really why the old system had to go
completely. people assume you're being lazy or cutting corners when you
deprecate something they like, and if you don't get ahead of that narrative it
just festers.

outcome was fine. churn from this was lower than we expected, like 2 accounts
left over it out of maybe 80 who used the feature regularly. most people adapted
faster than they said they would.

Tell me about a time you had to shut down a legacy feature vocal users still liked.

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