Moment of Change
End-of-life is product strategy’s final frontier. The Last Moment of Truth is where transformation is won or lost, and where producers have the most to gain.
Last week's letter ended with an appeal to working back from a future you want: start at the end (Possibility of Change). Taiichi Ohno's signature move in creating what would become known as Lean was to start the process at the end of the production line. Today we'll explore something like that: the end of a product's first life, at the Last Moment of Truth (LMOT).
Christian Rishel
What does the word moment mean? One sense is the instant: a point in time when something happens. Another comes from physics: the turning effect of a force around a pivot. Push a door near its hinges and not much happens. Push near the handle and it swings.
The Last Moment of Truth is both. It is the instant a customer parts with a product. And it is the pivot where a small, well-placed effort can turn a very heavy system. In our case that's the linear economy, which refuses to die.
A Costco exploded
A while ago I left city life and moved to the suburbs in California. Walking my dogs around the neighborhood I noticed something odd: nobody parked in their garage. Every car sat in the driveway. I attributed it to the weather. Who needs a garage where it hardly ever rains?
Every once in a while someone would leave their garage door open, and I could see inside. The mystery was solved. Piles of stuff teetered to the rafters, with a path barely wide enough to walk through. One day I told my wife that the inside of some of those garages looked like a Costco exploded.
My street was not unusual. A 2022 survey by Craftsman found that more than a third of American garages are too full to park a car in. When the garage fills up, the overflow has to go somewhere. As David Owen reported in The New Yorker last month, the United States now has more self-storage facilities than Starbucks, McDonald's, Walmart, Home Depot, Domino's, Dunkin', and Costco locations combined, by one industry founder's count. Holding people's extra stuff is a $40 billion business.
The last moment is easy to put off
The storage business earns it by meeting real needs. People in the industry say their business runs on "the four D's": death, displacement, divorce, and downsizing. Owen adds a fifth: the delusion that your children will want your furniture. Life collides with stuff, and the stuff needs somewhere to go for a while.
The trouble is the "for a while." Owen tells the story of a family who put their late mother's furniture in storage in 2006, meaning to sell it and give the proceeds to charity. It is all still there. They figure they have paid at least $50,000 in rent, more than the furniture is worth.
That is the usual fate of the last moment: it doesn't happen. It gets postponed, one month at a time. We carry the cost in rent and in square footage, and we carry it in our heads. We spent the last twenty years learning how to deal with information overload. This is the same thing, for stuff. We are maxed out, in every sense.
I don't think anyone set out to build an economy on wasteful irresolution. But that is what we have. As long as that's the case, producers have every incentive to engineer Manufactured Dependence. And it's costing us.
Every moment but the last
Marketers have studied the beginning of a product's life with real care. In the summer I walked through the family of moments in my review of Playing to Win. The Zero Moment of Truth is when a shopper does their research. The First is when they encounter a product on the shelf. The Second comes at home, when they first use it. There is an established discipline behind understanding the dynamics of such moments.
The Last Moment, until recently, had a lone tidying consultant from Japan. In her popular book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo asked her readers to thank their things before letting them go.
A small gesture of appreciation and civility between person and object rights the relationship. It lifts the guilt that keeps people holding on. Even for the things you never got around to using, she suggested a light approach: "Have a good journey. See you again soon!" Kondo found a way to add grace to the last moment. The marketers and designers have not adopted her spirit. Yet.
This is where the second sense of moment matters. Linear firms push near the door's hinge by focusing on the start of a product's life. The Last Moment of Truth sits out at the handle. It is the position of greatest leverage at a time when many firms could really use some. A modest effort at the LMOT can move a great deal: the customer's memory of the product, the value still in it, and what happens to it next.
Work backward from the goodbye
Tony Fadell, who led the team that made the iPod and later founded Nest, guided his teams to work backward from the moments where a product meets its customer. Write the press release before you build anything; that powers the Zero Moment. At Nest the packaging prototype came before the product form factor was final. The value proposition of a complicated new category was honed down to fit on the small cardboard box nearly a year before launch. That met the First Moment. Then his team prototyped the installation experience: the Second Moment.
The object of that last exercise was a special screwdriver. Each one cost about $1.50, and the team was focused on staying lean. They fought the idea of enclosing one with every thermostat they sold. Fadell won them over by reframing it. "It wasn't a straight COGS line item," he wrote. "It was a marketing expense. And a support expense." It cut support calls, earned glowing reviews, and sat in kitchen drawers for years, reminding people of the brand. It looked like over-investment until it was costed across the whole journey.
Fadell gave salient proof of managing product strategies around three Moments of Truth. Now let's extend his thinking. Put the Last Moment of Truth at the center of product and business strategy, and the case for investing there widens the way the screwdriver's did.
- It pays from several budgets. Support, marketing, recovery value, and repurchase can all share the cost of a good goodbye.
- The customer judges the whole service. By the last moment, the customer knows the product better than at any earlier point. They have lived with it.
- Endings color memory. Psychologists call it the peak–end rule: we judge an experience mostly by its most intense point and by how it ends. The last impression is the one that walks into the next purchase.
- A visible ending makes room for partners. When the cost and value at end of life are out in the open, refurbishers, resellers, and recyclers can plan around them. The cost of reverse logistics can be put into proper context.
- Letting go earns trust. Early Google said its goal was "to have people leave our website as quickly as possible." Data portability works on the same principle. People reward a product that lets go as easily as it engages.
Fadell drew the customer journey as a chain that "ends when your product disappears from their life, returned or thrown away, sold to a friend." He saw the end, which is more than most of us do. The next step is to design for it: write the farewell at the same time as the press release.
Paying for the end is not the same as caring about it
Governments have noticed the last moment too. Extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws require makers of packaging, electronics, and other goods to fund what happens to them at the end of life. Those laws exist for good reasons, and they work on the money.
But EPR is a regulatory response to producer apathy. It settles who pays, after the decision is made. The disposition decision itself happens earlier, in a closet or a garage, when someone picks up an object they once loved, feels no "spark of joy" (in Kondo's parlance), and chooses its fate: resell it, donate it, return it, recycle it, or put it back on the shelf for another year. EPR has nothing to say about that choice. The Last Moment of Truth begins there, with producer empathy for the customer at the moment of choice.
What a good goodbye looks like
A good last moment has a few qualities. It is frictionless, so the customer doesn't have to research what to do. It is delightful. It carries no guilt. It is designed on purpose, into the product and its business model. It is served proactively, so the solution presents itself before the pile in the garage does. And it is legible: the customer can see what happens next.
Firms already have some of the tools:
- Dismantling instructions that teach a product's disassembly as clearly as good assembly instructions teach its construction.
- Take-back services that meet the customer where they are.
- A surprise for whoever takes it apart: a message or a small gift for the person who takes part in the disassembly.
- Affordances for a second life, hooks an ecosystem can self-organize around.
These draw on three ideas this Letter has developed before. A good last moment has to be provisioned, which is the work of the Three Dynamos. It has to be worth living with, which is Systemic Beauty. And the customer has to choose it, which is where the Three Filaments come in. We'll take up each of them later in the season.
The takeaway
Every product ends somewhere. Every relationship has a goodbye. End-of-life is product strategy’s final frontier. Making a better LMOT is an opportunity to boldly go where few brands have gone before.
💬 Discuss: mention @christian@circudyne.com on Mastodon
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