Google Reader: Kill a Beloved Product

You are the VP of Product at Google in early 2013. The company is in the midst of "Spring Cleaning," a sweeping mandate from the CEO to focus resources on core bets like Android, YouTube, and the new social network, Google+. Every product that isn't moving the needle on these core strategic metrics is under intense scrutiny.

In your portfolio is Google Reader. It is a wildly successful RSS aggregator beloved by power users, journalists, and the tech elite. It has a deeply loyal daily active user base of millions, but user growth flatlined years ago. More importantly, it sits on legacy infrastructure that requires a complex, multi-quarter backend migration to stay operational and secure. The 3 engineers currently maintaining it are bogged down in technical debt and are begging to be moved to higher-impact projects.

The executive team wants Reader gone. They argue that RSS is a dying, archaic protocol, that real-time platforms like Twitter and Google+ are the future of news consumption, and that the engineering maintenance cost is entirely unjustifiable for a non-core product. You have to make the final call on how—or if—to execute the sunset of a product that power users consider the cornerstone of the open internet.

The principle: Killing a beloved product isn't just about turning off servers—it's a massive burn of user goodwill and brand equity. When "focusing" the company requires shutting down a product with intense power-user loyalty, the execution matters as much as the strategy. Abrupt sunsets destroy trust that takes decades to rebuild. The right way to sunset is to over-invest in the off-ramp, treating the product's death as a distinct user journey.