During my consulting career, I worked with a client who hired me to help them “innovate their product line.” They expected me to help them add new products. What I discovered, after weeks of research, was that they needed to remove existing ones.
The company had dozens of product variants. When I mapped them against revenue, a clear pattern emerged: a small handful of products generated the vast majority of revenue. The remaining products generated a fraction of revenue while consuming the majority of the operational complexity — manufacturing setup time, inventory management, sales training, marketing materials, customer support.
The innovation they needed wasn’t more products. It was fewer products done better. By cutting the low-performers and reinvesting the freed capacity into the top performers, they could improve quality, reduce costs, simplify operations, and grow revenue — all simultaneously. Not through addition. Through subtraction.
That project was the origin of the Subtraction Audit. It changed my entire understanding of what innovation actually means.
My Old Definition: Innovation = New Things
For the first decade of my consulting career, I operated under the standard innovation paradigm: innovation means creating new things. New products. New services. New processes. New markets. The word “innovation” was functionally synonymous with “addition.”
This definition shaped how I worked. When clients hired me for innovation consulting, I helped them brainstorm, prototype, and launch new offerings. The success metric was straightforward: how many new things did we create?
The manufacturer project challenged this definition directly. They didn’t need new things. They had too many things. The “innovation” they needed was the courage and methodology to remove what wasn’t working, which was far harder — psychologically and operationally — than adding something new.
Adding is easy. Adding feels productive. Adding is celebrated. Removing is hard. Removing feels like failure. Removing is questioned. But removing the wrong things to make room for the right things is often the most innovative act a business can perform.
The Subtraction Discovery
The time I spent researching the client’s product portfolio revealed something I’d never been taught in any innovation methodology: the relationship between complexity and performance is inverse after a certain point. More products created more complexity, which reduced the company’s ability to execute well on anything.
The symptoms were everywhere:
- Sales teams couldn’t articulate the differences between similar products
- Manufacturing constantly switched between product setups, reducing efficiency
- Marketing spread thin across too many product-specific campaigns
- Customer support faced a knowledge burden that grew with every new product
- Quality control struggled to maintain standards across so many variants
Each product had been added for a rational reason at the time. “The market wants this.” “A competitor offers that.” “One client requested this variant.” Individually, each addition made sense. Collectively, they were strangling the company.
This is what I now call the “complexity accumulation problem”: businesses add capabilities, products, and processes over time without proportionally removing old ones. The addition is visible and celebrated. The accumulated complexity is invisible and corrosive.
The solution wasn’t sophisticated. We categorized every product by revenue contribution, growth trend, strategic importance, and operational cost. Products that scored low on all four dimensions went on the cut list. Products that scored high went on the investment list. Products in the middle got an evaluation window.
The Kill or Commit framework emerged from this project too — the same binary decision applied at the product level: invest seriously or eliminate entirely.
The Resistance and the Breakthrough
Recommending cuts was easy. Implementing them was a battle.
Every product I proposed cutting had an internal champion — someone who’d developed it, sold it, or felt personally responsible for it. The head of sales pushed back on cutting products that “important clients” ordered (even when those clients ordered them once, two years ago). The head of manufacturing defended products he’d optimized production for (even when the optimization made the overall system less efficient). The CEO, who’d launched several of the products himself, resisted cutting his own creations.
The resistance wasn’t irrational. It was human. People attach identity to what they build. Cutting a product feels like devaluing the work that created it. This emotional attachment to past work is the biggest barrier to subtraction in any organization.
The breakthrough came when I reframed the cuts as investments in the remaining products. “We’re not eliminating these products because they’re bad. We’re freeing resources to make our best products even better.” Same action. Different frame. The frame mattered enormously.
The CEO — who’d been the most resistant — became the most enthusiastic advocate once he saw the financial projections. Cutting the low-performing products and reinvesting the freed manufacturing capacity, sales attention, and marketing budget into the top performers would increase projected profit substantially within a year. Not revenue — profit. Because the cost reduction from simplification was massive.
The Results
After implementing the subtraction project, the results exceeded our projections:
- Revenue from the remaining products increased meaningfully (because each product got more sales attention and marketing investment)
- Manufacturing efficiency improved significantly (fewer changeovers, simpler scheduling)
- Customer satisfaction scores increased (because the remaining products received more quality attention)
- Overall profit grew substantially
- The sales cycle shortened (simpler product line was easier for customers to evaluate)
The most striking result: not a single customer left because of a discontinued product. We’d feared a customer exodus. What actually happened was that customers, when informed that a low-performing product was being discontinued, either switched to a higher-quality alternative from the remaining range or acknowledged they hadn’t been ordering the discontinued product anyway.
The fear of cutting was dramatically worse than the reality of cutting. This is consistently true in my experience. The anticipated negative consequences of subtraction are almost always larger in imagination than in practice.
How This Changed Everything I Do
The manufacturer project fundamentally redirected my career. Innovation consulting shifted from “help companies build new things” to “help companies identify what to build and what to remove.” The Subtraction Audit became my signature methodology. The book series I eventually wrote centered on subtraction as a business principle.
The insight extends far beyond product portfolios. Every business accumulates complexity:
- Service businesses accumulate service offerings that fragment attention
- Content creators accumulate platforms and formats that dilute quality
- Solo founders accumulate activities and commitments that prevent focus
- Teams accumulate meetings and processes that consume time without producing value
In every case, the answer is the same: systematically identify what’s not earning its keep, remove it, and reinvest the freed resources in what is. The velocity principle is partly about speed, but it’s equally about removing the drag that prevents speed.
Innovation isn’t always about creating something new. Sometimes the most innovative thing you can do is stop doing something old.
Key takeaways:
- Innovation isn’t always addition — sometimes the most impactful move is subtracting products, services, or activities that create complexity without proportional value.
- Map every offering against revenue contribution, growth trend, strategic importance, and operational cost — the bottom 30-50% by these metrics are subtraction candidates.
- Reframe cuts as investments in what remains — “freeing resources for our best products” gets buy-in where “eliminating underperformers” creates resistance.
- The fear of cutting is almost always larger than the reality — anticipated negative consequences of subtraction rarely materialize at the scale imagined.
- Every business accumulates complexity over time — build a regular practice of identifying and removing what’s no longer earning its keep.
