Product teams are wired to build. The entire discipline celebrates creation: shipping features, hitting adoption targets, growing the surface area of what the product can do. But very few teams have a disciplined approach to the equally important work of removing things. At PR_D_CT DAY 2025 in Ghent, Judith Straetemans from Smooved challenged the audience to take deprecation seriously, not as a cleanup chore, but as a core product leadership skill.
To ground the talk in reality, Judith used Smooved, a Belgian proptech company that helps people manage their move, as a running case study. Over the years the Smooved product accumulated features that once made sense but no longer served the strategy. Judith walked through the real list of things that were removed: insurances as a service, gifts from realtors to users, SMS notifications, unnecessary email communications, a standalone confirmation flow, the mobile version, internal export functionality, and invoice uploads. Each one represented a real decision with real tradeoffs.
Her talk was structured around two pillars: prevention (how to stop clutter from accumulating in the first place) and remediation (how to systematically remove what already exists). For product managers sitting on years of accumulated features they know should go, this was one of the most practically useful sessions of the day.
