The product you should have killed six months ago Every business I work with has at least one. A product or service that made sense once, still generates some revenue, but quietly drains time, attention, and margin from everything else. People hold onto these things for reasons that feel rational. "It's part of our brand." "Some customers really love it." "We've already invested so much." All true. None of them are business reasons. I watched someone spend £14,000 last year maintaining a product line that contributed 3% of revenue but consumed 22% of their support tickets. They knew the numbers. They still couldn't pull the trigger. This is where a decision matrix earns its keep. What a decision matrix actually does A decision matrix forces you to compare options against the same criteria, with the same weights, at the same time. It removes the mental gymnastics that let you justify keeping something that should go. You list your products or services down one side. You list your evaluation criteria across the top. You score each product against each criterion. You weight the criteria by importance. You multiply and add. The output is a ranked list. Not a gut feeling. Not a debate. A number. The number does not make the decision for you. But it makes the decision visible. And that visibility is often what people need to act. Choosing the right criteria This is where most people get it wrong. They pick criteria that sound reasonable but do not actually reveal anything useful. "Customer satisfaction" sounds good. But if every product scores 7 out of 10, you have learned nothing. The criteria need to differentiate. Here is what I typically use when helping someone evaluate a product line: Gross margin percentage. Not revenue. Revenue hides unprofitable work. Margin shows what you actually keep. Time cost. How many hours per month does this product require from you or your team? Include support, fulfilment, and the mental overhead of context-switching. Strategic fit. Does this product move you toward where you want to be in two years, or does it anchor you to where you were? Opportunity cost. What could you do with the resources this product consumes? This one is harder to score, but it matters. Customer concentration risk. If one client accounts for 80% of a product's revenue, that is a vulnerability, not a strength. Five criteria is usually enough. More than seven and you start diluting the signal. Weighting without kidding yourself Not all criteria matter equally. The weighting reflects your priorities. I have seen people weight "strategic fit" at 10% and "current revenue" at 50%. Then they wonder why the matrix tells them to keep everything. The matrix only reflects what you tell it to value. If you are serious about building a business that works without you, weight time cost and strategic fit heavily. If you are optimising for cash this quarter, weight margin and revenue. Be honest about what you actually care about. The matrix will show you the consequences of those priorities. The Decision Matrix tool on alira.london lets you adjust weights and see how the ranking changes in real time. I use it with clients because it makes the trade-offs visible before anyone commits to a decision. The government's EV target problem There is a version of this playing out in public right now. The government is considering cutting electric vehicle sales targets from 80% to 50% by 2030, after pressure from car makers. That is a decision about which products to prioritise. The car makers are saying: we cannot hit these numbers profitably. The government is weighing strategic goals against industrial reality. You can agree or disagree with the direction. But notice the structure. Competing criteria. Stakeholders with different weights. A decision that has to be made even though no option is clean. Your product line decisions are smaller in scale but identical in structure. When the matrix tells you something you do not want to hear The matrix will sometimes rank a product last that you genuinely like. A service you built yourself. Something that feels like part of your identity. This is information, not instruction. You can override the matrix. But you should know what you are overriding and why. "I like this product" is a reason. It is just not a business reason. If you keep it anyway, own that choice. Do not pretend the numbers support something they do not. I have a client who kept a low-margin service because it brought in referrals worth three times the direct revenue. That context was not in the original matrix. We added a "referral value" criterion, re-scored, and the ranking changed. The matrix was not wrong. It was incomplete. The actual process Here is how I run this with people: First, list every product or service you currently offer. Include the ones you forgot about. Check your invoices from the last twelve months. Second, pick five criteria that will actually differentiate. If you are not sure, start with margin, time cost, strategic fit, opportunity cost, and customer concentration. Third, weight the criteria. Be honest. If cash matters more than strategy right now, say so. Fourth, score each product against each criterion. Use a simple scale: 1 to 5. Do not overthink individual scores. The pattern matters more than precision. Fifth, multiply scores by weights and sum. Rank the results. Sixth, look at the bottom of the list. That is your cut list. Not necessarily today. But soon. What to do this week Monday: List every product or service you have invoiced in the last twelve months. Include the small ones. Include the ones you wish would go away. Wednesday: Build a decision matrix with five criteria. Use the Decision Matrix tool on alira.london if you want something that calculates automatically. Score everything honestly. Friday: Look at the bottom three. Pick one to phase out by the end of next quarter. Tell someone you are doing it. Accountability helps.