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I want to tell you about a feature that nearly died.
Low engagement. Barely any daily active users touching it. By every dashboard metric a PM would check, it was dead weight. The kind of thing you flag in a quarterly review and say ‘let’s sunset this.’
Maret Kruve wrote about this on Product Coalition. The feature had poor usage numbers. Considering engagement alone, it should have been killed.
But here is what the dashboard did not show: that same feature made potential customers go ‘wow’ during sales demo calls. It was contributing to closed deals more than any other feature on the platform.
Read that again. The feature with the worst engagement metric was the strongest revenue driver.
This is the gap I keep coming back to. We measure what is easy to measure. DAUs, MAUs, feature adoption rates, NPS. These are product metrics. They tell you whether something gets used.
They do not tell you whether something makes money.
Tanay Agrawal learned this the hard way growing a product from zero to 100 customers. His team kept adding features and bundling them into pricing tiers. The plans got so complicated that customers stopped buying. Every feature had a carrying cost in maintenance and support, and nobody had visibility into which features actually drove revenue.
Tanay’s conclusion was blunt: everyone in the team should be able to look at and dissect subscription data at will. Not just the finance team. Not just the CEO. Everyone.
How many product teams can actually do that today?
Sebastian Mueller catalogued the damage when this goes wrong. The worst pricing mistake is not charging too much. It is underpricing so significantly that your unit margins are negative. You lose money by selling and scaling. Every new customer costs you.
Think about what that means. Your growth metric goes up. Your revenue goes up. And you are going broke.
This is why I think the most dangerous phrase in product is ‘users love it.’ Users loving something and that something being profitable are two completely different conversations. And most PMs only know how to have one of them.
Jon Matheson wrote a follow-up piece that landed on the same point from a different angle. His argument: stop asking ‘do users like this?’ Start asking ‘does this pay for itself?’
Not eventually. Not once you hit scale. Right now, at current volume, with current margins.
If you cannot answer that question about the last feature you shipped, you are not alone. But it is worth sitting with the discomfort for a minute.
I have a question for you. Have you ever killed a feature based on usage data, then discovered it was quietly driving revenue somewhere you were not looking? Or kept a feature alive that looked great on dashboards but was actually bleeding money?
Hit reply. I want to hear what happened.