Portfolio framework: rebuild · remediate · retire
STOP pauses every legacy product — but not every product should come back the same way. This framework gives each product an explicit disposition, decided on evidence and recorded as a decision, so the portfolio exits STOP deliberately instead of drifting back to business as usual. It structures the decision; the decision itself belongs to Leadership and Product.
The three dispositions
- Rebuild — the product goes through the full RAPID pipeline, StudyBuddy-style. Entry criteria: sustained client demand (weighted signals, not anecdotes); revenue worth defending or growing; debt interest so high that remediation is dead money; strong strategic fit; a migration cost the revenue case can carry. Rebuilds queue behind the CXsmart scale-up gate — the pattern is proven before it is repeated.
- Remediate & hold — the product is brought to Definition of Stable and kept serviceable, but not rebuilt yet. Entry criteria: real revenue and client base with stable scope; manageable debt interest once STOP remediation lands; a migration cost or delivery risk that outweighs the rebuild payoff today. Every hold carries a revisit trigger — a date or a signal threshold at which the disposition is re-scored.
- Retire — the product is sunset on a plan. Entry criteria: weak or declining client demand; revenue below the cost of carrying the product; debt interest exceeding contribution; strategic fit gone; a viable migration path for remaining clients. Retirement is a project, not an announcement — contract notice periods, data return and retention under UK GDPR, and regulated clients' outsourcing-notification obligations all sit in the plan.
The three dispositions map loosely onto the Gartner TIME quadrants (invest / tolerate / eliminate, with "migrate" folded into the rebuild path) — adapted so that every route out of STOP passes through a gate.
The scoring dimensions
Each product is scored 1–5 on five dimensions. The point of scoring is not false precision — it is forcing the same questions, with evidence, for every product.
| Dimension | What it measures | Evidence source |
|---|---|---|
| Client demand | Weighted, deduplicated demand — revenue-at-risk and frequency, not volume of noise | Signal register |
| Revenue | ARR plus committed pipeline attributable to the product | Commercial |
| Debt interest | The recurring cost of carrying the product as-is: incidents, manual deployment steps, security exposure, EOL components | Tech-debt register, security-debt register, EOL inventory, DORA baseline |
| Strategic fit | Whether the product belongs in the portfolio RAPID is building towards | Leadership |
| Migration cost | What a rebuild or retirement really costs: data migration, client contracts and notice periods, regulatory obligations, parallel running | Delivery + Commercial |
The scoring matrix
All cells are TBD until the STOP audits populate the registers and Commercial supplies revenue figures — scoring before the evidence exists would just launder opinions into numbers.
| Product | Client demand | Revenue | Debt interest | Strategic fit | Migration cost | Proposed disposition |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VOC | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD |
| ACCORD | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD |
| Foundation | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD |
| Verify | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD |
| CLM | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD |
| MDDi | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD |
| ClaimPilot | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD |
Every disposition is an ADR
- One ADR per product, using the ADR template (type: product), per the decision-records standard — the scores, the options considered and the decisive reasons, on the record.
- Status is explicit — Proposed until Leadership and Product accept; a changed disposition supersedes, it never silently edits.
- Remediate & hold ADRs must carry the revisit trigger in the revisit-by field — an open-ended hold is a retire decision nobody signed.
- Retire ADRs must name the migration-plan owner and the client-notice, contract and data obligations the sunset must honour.
Dispositions are Leadership + Product decisions — this framework prepares them, it does not make them. Pending before scoring can start: Commercial revenue figures per product, a client-contract review for notice and exit obligations, and the STOP audit outputs landing in the registers.
Standards referenced: Gartner TIME model (adapted).