Product managers love building. The entire discipline is oriented around creation: identifying opportunities, defining solutions, shipping features, and measuring adoption. What almost nobody talks about is the equally important work of removing things. Deprecation, the deliberate sunsetting of features, products, or capabilities, is one of the most neglected skills in product management.
At PR_D_CT DAY 2025 in Ghent, Judith Straetemans brought her experience from Stripe to tackle this uncomfortable topic head-on. Stripe, a company known for its developer-first approach and its obsessive attention to API design, has had to deprecate features and APIs multiple times as it evolved. Judith's talk explored the frameworks, communication strategies, and leadership principles that make deprecation possible without destroying the customer trust that took years to build.
For the product managers in the audience, many of whom were carrying the weight of features they knew should be retired but did not know how to remove, this talk was both validating and practically useful.
Original Presentation Slides
Download the slides from this talk as presented at the gathering.
