15 hard reset options in product management

You can’t deny what a great feeling it is to start on a new project without having to deal with the mistakes of the past. The only thing holding your product back might be the past.

Tomorrow is the first day of spring where I live. It’s a season of new beginnings and a time when the physical landscape turns from a dull grey and brown to a lush green dotted with colourful flowers. It’s like a hard reset for the landscape and a great time to be outside.

It reminds me of doing a hard reset on a computer or game console when it wasn’t performing as expected (we still have to do this, but not as often).

This post was originally published in my Substack newsletter. See Roadmap Weekly for this post and more, including audio versions.

In a similar sense of new beginnings and hard resets, software development has the phrase “nuke and pave,” referring to the destruction of the current version and starting over.

You have probably heard engineers ask for this before, saying things like:

• “This is our chance to correct our past mistakes.”
• “The previous team that wrote this is no longer here, and no one understands this code.”
• “We’ve learned so much since building this version.”

I’ve heard engineers get a bad reputation for suggesting what seems like such a drastic conclusion. However, it’s often justified. Are you still using the same cell phone from 10 years ago?

Regardless, you can’t deny what a great feeling it is to start on a new project without having to deal with the mistakes of the past.

But what if you wanted to start over from a product management perspective?

In Product Management, the equivalent of “nuke and pave” or a hard reset would resemble one of the following 15 strategies. In reality, many of these things could be A/B tests you run, but in some cases, the nuclear option is the best.

1. “Blank Slate Roadmap” — Scrapping your current roadmap and starting over, free from past assumptions or legacy commitments.
2. “Zero-Day Product Strategy” — Re-evaluating the entire product strategy as if you were starting from scratch, questioning everything from customer segments to the core problem you’re solving.
3. “Feature Purge” — Removing legacy features, tech debt-driven decisions, or half-baked experiments that clutter the product experience and drain resources.
4. “Reboot the Backlog” — Deleting (or archiving) the entire backlog and only re-adding items that are still relevant and clearly aligned with the current business goals.
5. “Hard Reset” — A radical shift in priorities, often triggered by market changes, executive mandates, or failed execution that requires a complete restart. This usually means starting over with an entirely new product within the same market.
6. “Strategic Debt Payoff” — Just as engineers push to wipe out tech debt, PMs can advocate for eliminating strategic debt and past decisions that constrain growth due to outdated business models, pricing structures, or poor positioning.
7. “Kill Your Darlings” — Borrowed from writing, this means letting go of cherished but underperforming features, products, or strategies that no longer serve the company’s best interest.
8. “Greenfield Pivot” — If a product or initiative is too bogged down by bad decisions, poor market performance, and no traction, shifting resources to an entirely new product space without the constraints of the past could be the answer. What the makers of Slack did is a classic example.
9. “Team & Process Overhaul” — Resetting how product decisions are made, eliminating inefficient processes, excess bureaucracy, and unnecessary rituals.
10. “Cancel every meeting” — Spotify famously did this with all recurring meetings of three or more people in 2023.
11. “Sunsetting the Zombie Product” — Your company might have a “zombie” product that still exists but barely grows, rarely improves, and is just a drain on resources.
12. “Pricing Model Overhaul” — Completely rebuilding the monetization strategy. Scrap your existing pricing tiers, switch from freemium to enterprise sales (or vice versa), or shift to a usage-based model.
13. “Customer Reset” — Reassessing your ideal customer profile (ICP) and target market from scratch instead of relying on outdated user personas or assumptions.
14. “Re-evaluate everything from an outcomes mindset” — Scrapping the existing feature-driven mindset and restructuring around customer outcomes may allow you to drop or simplify some existing features.
15. “Vision Refresh” — This is about rewriting the North Star to realign product, strategy, and company mission.

At some point in my career, I’ve taken nearly every one of these actions, and I’ve yet to regret it. It’s great when you can let go of a few things and reduce the drag. Like a hot air balloon trying to take flight, the only thing holding your product back might be a few sandbags.

If you’re going through or need a reset with your product and are looking for support, check out my coaching profile on mentorcruise.com. I still have a couple of spots left for next quarter.

This post was originally published in my Substack newsletter. See Roadmap Weekly for this post and more, including audio versions.