The context
A global internet-infrastructure company. Inside it sat an internal security-scanning tool that had started life as an engineer's side project. It was genuinely useful — security teams across the internet relied on it to inspect suspicious links — but nobody owned it. No roadmap, no pricing, no support model, no one accountable for whether it lived or died.
Every company has a product like this. The question is never whether it has users. It is whether someone is willing to make the hard calls: give it a home and a strategy, or shut it down cleanly.
The challenge
The tool had real traction and real risk in equal measure. Usage was growing on its own, but the infrastructure cost was growing with it. There was no commercial model, so every new user was pure cost. And because no team owned it, the engineers maintaining it were doing so on top of their actual jobs — the classic recipe for a product that quietly rots until it becomes an incident.
The intervention
Adopt the orphan. The first step was simply taking ownership — making one person accountable for the decision either way. Before writing a line of strategy, I assessed the honest options: commercialise it, fold it into an existing product, or deprecate it and migrate the users.
Evidence before conviction. I dug into the usage data to understand who was actually using it and what for. The signal was clear: a specific cohort of security practitioners used it as a daily investigation tool, not a toy. That cohort became the entire strategy.
Commercialisation, carefully. Rather than bolting on a paywall, the work was packaging: defining a free tier that kept the goodwill of the security community, a paid tier aimed at the professional cohort, and an enterprise path through the existing sales organisation. Positioning moved from "internal tool" to "security product" — which meant documentation, reliability commitments, and a support model, not just a price tag.
Close to engineering. The whole thing was done with the engineers who had kept it alive, not to them. Their knowledge of the sharp edges shaped what we could responsibly sell.
The outcome
- The tool became a commercial product used by thousands of customers a month.
- In the first few months of the year after commercialisation, it doubled the entire previous year's usage.
- The engineering team went from maintaining a liability in their spare time to owning a product with a roadmap — and the deprecation question was answered with evidence rather than neglect.
What I took from it
Orphaned products are a test of product leadership. The easy options — ignore it, or kill it to make the problem go away — are often both wrong. The discipline is in the middle: look at the evidence honestly, decide who it is really for, and be willing to do the unglamorous work of packaging, pricing and support that turns usage into a business.