Cutting a 29-Product Portfolio Down

Cutting a 29-Product Portfolio Down to What Actually Sells Problem. A portfolio of 29 products grown organically from client requests. An audit found that none of them were commercially ready to sell: no pricing model, no sales enablement, almost no documentation. Engineering capacity was spread across products nobody could monetize.

Action. Ran a full portfolio triage against strategic value and commercial viability, landing on four dispositions: keep, evolve, research, kill. The hard part was not the analysis — it was that several kill candidates still carried live revenue, so each one needed a migration path rather than a shutdown date. Paired the triage with an operating model change: no new product enters a build sprint without a named first client and a signed-off commercial definition.

Result. Portfolio reduced to a focused set with explicit migration paths for everything retired, and a governance gate that stopped the pattern from repeating.