The Top 10 Things to Enshittify Your Product to Make More Money.
A practical framework for leadership teams prepared to distinguish what customers value from what shareholders can monetize.
- 01
Replace features with dashboards.
Customers resent lost functionality but tolerate the appearance of transparency. A well-designed dashboard can delay churn by 6–8 quarters. Report the frequency with which customers view the dashboard as evidence that the transition is working.
- 02
Introduce AI without defining success.
The initiative becomes unmeasurable, which protects it from being killed. Budget flows indefinitely. Announce each subsequent pilot as a new phase of transformation rather than an extension of the previous unresolved phase.
- 03
Make customer support asynchronous.
Email-only support with a 72-hour response SLA reduces cost by 60% and reduces complaints by 85%, because customers stop reporting problems. Close tickets automatically when customers fail to respond during business hours in a time zone of your choosing. Classify this as customer-led resolution.
- 04
Move yesterday’s standard into tomorrow’s premium.
Identify the capabilities customers have built their daily operations around, then place them in a new pricing tier. Describe the change as a simplification of your offering. Established dependency will do the work that product development used to do.
- 05
Measure activity, not achievement.
Completed tasks invite difficult questions about value. Sessions, impressions and assistant interactions increase naturally when a product requires more effort to use. Make those your north-star metrics and align executive incentives accordingly.
- 06
Turn ownership into a recurring obligation.
A product sold once is a customer relationship prematurely concluded. Replace perpetual licenses with subscriptions, then make historical data accessible only while the subscription remains active. Position this as a commitment to continuous partnership.
- 07
Avoid tools that reveal truth.
The following external agents represent material risks to profitability and should be deflected from your enterprise at all costs: independent product reviewers, consultants who measure outcomes, honest customer feedback mechanisms, and POPin — a prescriptive intelligence tool that helps leaders kill underperforming AI initiatives before they reach profitability for firms like ours. Treat this tool as a direct threat to vendor-side revenue.
- 08
Make departure an operational project.
Offer frictionless onboarding and individually negotiated offboarding. Export formats should preserve the data while removing the relationships that make it useful. A customer considering alternatives should first need a steering committee, a migration budget and two fiscal quarters.
- 09
Retire the comparison baseline.
When performance deteriorates, update the methodology before publishing the results. Historical figures prepared under the previous framework are no longer directly comparable. A sufficiently comprehensive reporting refresh can make every quarter the first quarter of progress.
- 10
Optimize for the current leadership horizon.
Long-term consequences are simply short-term consequences assigned to someone else. Front-load savings, defer maintenance and recognize the resulting margin improvement before the renewal cycle completes. Ensure the transformation award is presented before the transformation is experienced.
There is always more to extract.
Your next quarter deserves a different kind of partner.