# When to kill a feature

> Most products die of accumulation. I kill features when usage is thin, the maintenance tax is real, and the roadmap story gets weaker every week I leave them alive.

- Author: Kevin Dalvi
- Published: 2026-01-28
- Read time: 7 minutes
- Tags: product, process, founding
- Canonical: https://www.kevindalvi.com/blog/when-to-kill-a-feature

Shipping feels like progress. Deleting feels like failure. That’s why products get heavier every quarter until nobody remembers what the core loop was. I’ve kept features alive for ego. “we built that”. Long after users stopped caring.

Killing a feature is product work. It’s not vandalism. You’re choosing focus with a delete key instead of another launch blog post.

## My kill criteria

I look at three signals together: usage, cost, and narrative. Low usage alone isn’t enough. Some power features are quiet. But low usage plus ongoing bugs, plus a story that no longer fits the product, is a death sentence.

Cost includes support load, engineering fear (“don’t touch that module”), and cognitive load on every new user who sees an option they don’t need. Narrative means: would I still pitch this feature in a first demo? If I skip it in demos for three months, it’s already dead. I’m just paying rent.

> A feature that doesn’t earn its place in the demo is already dead. Shipping kept it breathing.

## How I actually remove things

- Find the real users. If there are five, talk to them before you ghost them
- Offer a migration path or export; don’t punish loyalty for your cleanup
- Remove from UI first if you need a soft landing, then delete the code
- Write the changelog like an adult: why it’s gone, what to use instead

## Grief is part of the job

Someone on the team will be attached. Maybe you. I schedule a short autopsy: what we learned, what we’d try differently, then we move. Dwelling turns a clean cut into a political wound.

Kill features that dilute the product. Protect the ones that define it. If you can’t tell which is which, your roadmap is already lying to you. And deletion is how you get honest again.