The Sunset

What this pack runs.

A product can stop paying long before it stops being used. What makes retiring it a decision late is that its own revenue is small enough to fall below the level at which anyone reviews margins by product, so it moves for years without an advocate and arrives on an agenda already described as a burden, with a saving on the page and nothing beside it. That is not the comparison. Keeping a product that loses money is one option and retiring it is the other, and retiring has a price of its own: the one-time cost of the ending, plus the customers. The people still on the product buy other things from you, and a share of them leave you entirely when it goes, taking everything else they buy with them. This pack turns that into a subtraction and an annuity. What the product loses a year, across the years you would otherwise keep it and discounted, is what keeping it costs. Against it: the one-time cost of retiring, plus the wider spend of the customers who go with it, less what a replacement earns from the ones who move. Both sides are linear in the loss, so the whole question reduces to the break-even loss, how much more the product would have to lose a year before retiring it is cheaper, and the distance from it to today's loss is what a board can watch. It stops on two halts: no one has joined the product's customer list to the sales ledger, and no one has estimated the share who would go, which cannot be surveyed because asking announces the ending.

The casebooks these cases come from.

The pack reads nine sourced decisions through the framework. They are drawn from these casebooks, each one a set of verified records on a single decision type.

A verified record has passed a mechanical claim-versus-source check, a second model's read, and human approval. The count is what exists today, not a target.