Execute the discipline everything has been building toward: the kill criteria from M4 and M7, run without sentimentality, through a written protocol — and one real product formally retired, with post-mortem, by the end of the module. Not theory. The kill is the deliverable. Killing products is graceful degradation plus the circuit breaker: when downstream isn't recovering, you stop sending traffic; you don't pretend it'll be healthy next minute. Most engineer-founders run their portfolios without circuit breakers, which is why the zombies limp on. The post-mortem is the incident review — blameless toward your past self, specific about the system. The sunset checklist is the deprecation policy you already respect in software: announce, version, migrate, then remove — users of products deserve at least what users of APIs get. And the freed energy is the practical compensation: deleting code you spent days writing taught you that removal is a feature; this is the same lesson at portfolio scale, and the practice of shipping kills makes the next one cheaper.
This course unlocks once you've finished its prerequisite. Open prerequisite →
You will write the kill protocol and then find reasons to delay applying it, and I want that prediction in writing because the prediction is the entire intervention. The protocol-…
Engineer-founders accumulate zombie products: projects that don't make money, don't have traction, and never get formally killed. Each zombie costs ongoing maintenance, emotional …
Approach: Essential
Approach: Important
Approach: Essential
Approach: Important
Applied to at least one product your M4 matrix marked for kill.
7 lessons. Read in order; spiral back when you need to. By the end you'll have used the core ideas twice — once on the abstract, once on something you'll meet at work next week.