Stage: NextGen

Regardless of how well the product is built and maintained, there’s a time to take it off the market. Retirement can be brought on by a significant technology shift, competitor entrance, or user behavior changes in the market.

This means you re-invent the technology platform/business model/user experience to keep an edge in the market. ISVs should be watchful to identify this need to disrupt their business model before a competitor does.

When a next-gen product is planned, it’s essential to do it with minimal disturbance to the existing customers, revenue, and market share. Clear and pain-free migration paths should be available and provide incentives/motivation for them to move-on. Long-term side-by-side operation of 2 major versions can be an extremely costly operation. For this reason, plan to complete migrating all your customers within a scheduled period.

• End-of-life Roadmap: Identify under which circumstances to retire the product in view of migrating to the new product along with end-of-service support models.
• Data Migration Plan: Systematic plan to smoothly migrate users from the old platform to new platform without losing users’ data. Have a migration support strategy. Manage customer licenses and contracts to support migration activities.
• Platform Migration Plan: Create a strategy and an action plan to migrate all solution components from old system to the new system while running in parallel.
• Team Knowledge Transfer Plan: Create a plan to document both tacit and implicit knowledge and create a knowledge base to ramp up materials to transfer knowledge.
• Digital Data Shredding: With customer’s consent to close the account, permanently delete data and provide a mechanism to export customer’s data on request.