Software Development At SAP: Product Strategy

We’ve all been there: Sometimes, things just don’t work out. Instead of trying to salvage something that is beyond salvageable, it’s more reasonable to just scrap it entirely and cut your losses. Software companies are often faced with the difficult decision of which products to keep and which to toss. ERP giant SAP is especially notorious for deprecating products almost as soon as it introduces them. For example, Leonardo was announced in 2018. In an E-3 interview, CTO Jürgen Müller admitted that SAP had withdrawn Leonardo as an independent brand in 2020. In IT, two years is nothing! If we were talking about an ERP system, most customers wouldn’t even have been done customizing it yet after two years. If SAP (or any other software company) then decided to pull the plug, all investments made would have been money down the drain. However, before a product is completely tossed, there usually are some warning signals that customers can look out for to know where to invest.