The AI Feature Kill Decision: When to Shut Down What Metrics Say Is Working
· 10 min read
Your AI feature has 12,000 monthly active users. Engagement charts slope upward. The demo still impresses stakeholders every quarter. And your users are quietly routing around it.
This is the kill decision that product teams avoid for months — sometimes years — because every surface-level metric says the feature is working. The dashboard shows adoption. What it doesn't show is the support engineer who manually corrects every third AI-generated summary before forwarding it to the customer, or the power user who learned that clicking "regenerate" three times produces acceptable output and has silently accepted that tax on their workflow.
