It’s an uncomfortable number, but according to Pendo around 80% of features are barely or never used. They stay in the code, add to the user’s cognitive load and slow down shipping anything new.

This is exactly where the idea of product garbage collection comes in. Garbage collection is a concept from computer science and it maps surprisingly well onto product development. It does exactly what it promises: it takes out the trash.

The Value of Cleaning Up

The idea behind garbage collection is to remove what no longer delivers value but still ties up resources. In memory management it frees up memory that isn’t reachable anymore. Anyone who used Windows back in the day will remember defragmenting the hard drive for the same reason: clean things up and the machine runs faster again.

The same thing happens in a product when you consistently clean up rarely used features. There’s less maintenance load, and team capacity frees up for features that actually deliver value. The user has a lower cognitive load, because fewer options make it easier to find your way around (Hick’s Law). And development gets faster with less code and fewer dependencies.

Why Scope Accumulates and Rarely Shrinks

The researchers Meyvis and Yoon show that people naturally lean towards adding rather than taking away, even when adding is the more complicated route. Subtractive solutions often don’t even come to mind and when they do, they tend to feel less valuable or less creative.

On top of that, removing something can easily be read as criticism of whoever built it, which triggers resistance. So the product just keeps growing, while the cleanup never happens.

Mark and Sweep as a Cleanup Routine

The cleanup could work in a product much like garbage collection does. There’s a so-called mark and sweep routine that marks what’s still needed and then collects everything else.

Applied to a product, that would mean giving every feature a measurable threshold, say feature engagement over the last quarter. Anything below a defined level of feature adoption automatically lands on the candidate list, ready to be thrown out with the trash.

The trick is flipping the burden of proof: a feature has to be actively defended to stay, instead of being actively attacked to go. That’s exactly what gets around the psychological resistance to taking things away.