Fixing a bad feature deprecation email

Dissecting and rehabilitating a real feature deprecation email from a popular Series A startup.

Aug 08, 2023

Last month I received a feature deprecation message from a company whose product I love but whose emails make me cringe. I’d like to take the 231 words they chose and use them as examples of what not to do while simultaneously deriving best practices. At the end, I’ll share my full rewrite of their message. Let’s take each issue in turn.

1. If this is your first message, you’ve already failed

The message, from Motion, an AI productivity assistant company, started as follows:

Before receiving this message, I had no context whatsoever. Motion thrust me directly into the result of what was apparently an internal debate about getting rid of Focus Time. It’s not ideal for the customer to start by learning that there is an important issue that could impact them, to not be included, and then to find out that the decision has already been made, all within the first two sentences.

The first step in writing a strong feature deprecation message is the research beforehand. We must check our usage analytics and find all the users of the feature. Then we can craft an initial message letting them know that you might deprecate the feature. Bring the customer into the process so you’re not inflicting loss aversion all at once. The customer will feel heard and, crucially, you will know if deprecation is the right move and how to conduct it. If the customer doesn’t use the feature, don’t send them a message about this at all!

2. I don’t know your feature names

Here is the subject line from the original message, and because I’m not an expert in your product, I don’t know if I should spend time reading this email.

How you name your features may seem obvious because it’s in the product’s UI writing, but your customers don’t know most of your features’ names. You have to accept that feature names are inside baseball. I know objectively what the words “focus” and “time” mean, but I have no idea if I am a user of Focus Time, the feature. I need more context on what it does to determine if this message is relevant to me.

To fix this, add a brief explanation of the term in your message to remind me. Something like “Focus Time, our feature for ensuring you have enough time outside of meetings to get your work done” would work fine. Now I know what we are talking about. It’s even better if you include a screenshot of where this button is in the product so I really know which feature we are discussing.

3. If you take, you must also give

Moments later, Motion informs me that all of my “Focus time” tasks will be removed.

To summarize through this moment: I have been told that a favorite feature is going away and that I’m on my own to deal with the consequences. The product will soon have less value for me.

We must give customers a clear and painless transition plan. Later in the message we learn that “Recurring Tasks” will take on the responsibilities that used to fall to “Focus Time,” except Motion doesn’t promise to migrate my Focus Time tasks to Recurring Tasks. This is a major miss. Now I have to work hard as a customer to retain the same value I used to receive.

4. Don’t insult the user

Motion decides to insult me in the very next sentence.

What Motion is saying, implicitly, is that the feature I love is inherently low-quality (news to me), and that I am a lover of what is apparently a bad productivity experience that no one at Motion wants to maintain. Now they’ve broken the fourth wall, so to speak, in that Motion is sharing its internal dirty laundry with me as a user. I don’t care, and neither do the other users. There are plenty of ways to build empathy with your customers in a long, hard product journey, but telling them the feature they love is poor-quality isn’t the way. Also, it begs the question, if they released this feature in poor form, what else in the product is at that same low bar?

No matter how much that feature annoys your product team, you have to avoid the “we know better than you” attitude. Even if you do know better, no one wants to read that. It alienates paying users. It’s also duplicitous. You put the feature in there in the first place, which means that at some point you thought it was a good idea. We know that and you know that, so framing the change as “we think the old workflow was dumb” just makes the user read “this product that I pay for thinks I’m dumb.”

And then they do it again. Apparently what I like isn’t “highly requested.” Facepalm!

5. Proofread mass messages for clarity

Finally we arrive at a paragraph that explains what’s going on. It’s great … until we get to the part about “we don’t think this is necessary.” Now I’m really confused. My favorite feature is going away. There’s a replacement in another feature, but the team doesn’t think I should use the replacement?

Surely Motion meant something else here, but I have no idea what that is, so now I’m sitting wondering, do I ignore this altogether or is something bad about to happen to my data? On a good day, I’ll send a message to support and ask; on a bad one, I’ve already started looking for a competitor that can solve this challenge without all the subtle insults and lack of clarity.

I’m left wondering, why didn’t Motion automate this transition? If Recurring Tasks is so much higher-quality and an approved replacement, then why do I have to do a solo transition?

6. Hold my hand

Let’s say I get over all that. How do I start using Recurring Tasks? The underline in their message, frustratingly, is not a hyperlink to a user guide or a video. It’s just a plain old underline. Boo!

We often forget that our customers don’t know the inner workings of our product. This is a painful lesson for a product team or founder, but even your strongest power users for the most part have about 1/10th the knowledge and familiarity you have.

Now I’m angry, and I don’t even know for sure if this message affects me. I know I have some specialized tasks, but are they Recurring ones or Focus Time ones? How would I know? Where in the app do I go to check if I’m impacted? If I am impacted, is there a video, tutorial, migration assistant, or some documentation to help me translate my old Focus Time tasks into Recurring Tasks?

7. Only solicit feedback if you want it

Toward the end, Motion’s message comes with a disingenuous opportunity to provide feedback. Why would anyone who loves this feature contact the company? They’ve already been insulted, and the message is so firm about Motion’s intentions that it’s clear that the team won’t care if someone does want to keep this feature.

Sure, they will help us migrate if we write them a message, but they’ve made a unilateral feature decision, didn’t solicit input, and we’ve been given no transition path. Their minds are made up. This sentence is insincere at best.

On the flip side, deprecating features is hard. It takes guts. Most teams don’t do it and they create creeping monoliths of badness. So I applaud them for taking action, but the way it’s done matters. If the decision has been made and user feedback doesn’t matter here (or if it’s already been collected in a smaller forum), don’t offer to hear my “concerns”; just say this is what you have to do, that you’ve consulted the community, and you’re here to help with the transition. Honesty really is the best policy.

8. Title your message for impact

Titles frequently are wasted real estate, yet they are the most important real estate. If I wasn’t a power user, I would not have even opened “Upcoming Changes to Focus Time,” which is the title the message begins with.

Instead of “Upcoming Changes to Focus Time,” how about “Focus Time Is Now Recurring Tasks”? With this new title I can easily discern if this is for me and the “so what” or the reason for the message. This also frees up Motion to focus the message on what’s being given and not on what’s being taken away. The headline should communicate that Recurring Tasks is now badass in new ways, not that Focus Time will be removed in the night when no one is looking.

9. Tell me WHY!!

Next, explain why your understanding of the world has changed. What has Motion learned that I should know? Why does a Recurring Task serve me better? In this message, it would have been as easy as “We’ve noticed that Recurring Tasks solves the same problems that Focus Time does, and by combining these into one, we know we can improve the reliability and usability of the experience for everyone.”

10. Non-accountable sign-off

Not every message has to come from the founder, but please empower your PMs. Let the team that is working on this sign with someone’s name. It shows that there is a real human behind the decision, that you’re proud of your decisions, and that you care. When it’s written this way, with generic statements about support and understanding, it reads like AI wrote it to hide the ball.

My Rewrite

For comparison, here is the full original message from Motion. And here is my two-part rewrite based on the guidance above.

Part 1: Feedback Message

Subject: Protecting Your Focus Time

Hi Adam,

We see that you use Focus Time regularly and want to get in touch. As a reminder, Focus Time (screenshot below) is our feature for ensuring you have enough time outside of meetings to get your work done. We’re contemplating replacing it with a more powerful feature called Recurring Tasks and would like to get your feedback on the particulars before we make any changes.

Would you be so kind as to fill out this three-question survey for us (survey link) or, better yet, we’d be happy to speak with you on the phone (schedule here) to capture important workflows before we make any changes.

–Jane

Tasks PM @ Motion

Part 2: Deprecation Message

Subject: Focus Time Is Now Recurring Tasks

Hi Adam,

We’re pleased to share that the new version of Recurring Tasks is ready and it’s replacing Focus Time on September 1, 2023. Recurring Tasks captures all of the work you used to do with Focus Time, its performance is 10x faster, and it optimizes your schedule 25% more efficiently. It also gives you the power to do [new capability 1, new capability 2, and new capability 3], which Focus Time couldn’t support.

It’s never an easy decision to sunset a feature people rely on, so we’ve set up an automatic transition that will change all of your Focus Time tasks into Recurring Tasks. It will automatically complete on August 1, 2023, at 10 p.m. PT, giving us a full month to work out any unintended consequences together and ensure that you stay in “Motion” on what matters.

There’s no action needed from you now, but if you want to get started sooner, check out our tutorial on how to use Recurring Tasks to save an extra three hours a week, a guide on how to transition sooner if you’d like, and an article explaining more context on the research we did with users to be sure we don’t miss important needs [links].

As always, feel free to reach out with any questions about this transition to jane@usemotion.app.

Best,

Jane

Tasks PM @ Motion

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