We built 12 features this year. Our churn rate doubled. I think we overbuilt.

At the start of this year, our team made a resolution to ship faster and listen to every piece of user feedback. We went from doing monthly releases to weekly releases. We added a new dashboard, an API, a mobile app, and 9 other major features.

Our product roadmap looked incredibly impressive.

But I just pulled our Q3 numbers, and I feel sick. Our churn rate has doubled from 4% to 8%, and our support tickets are up 300%.

When I started doing win/loss interviews with the customers who left, a painful pattern emerged. None of them left because we were missing a specific feature. They left because the app became too complicated.

One user told me: "I used to log in and know exactly what to do in 10 seconds. Now there are 5 new menus, pop-ups asking me to try the new API, and I can't even find the main button I use every day."

We thought we were adding value. In reality, we were burying our core value proposition under a mountain of shiny new toys. We built features for the 5% of vocal power users, and alienated the 80% of silent users who just wanted the tool to remain simple and fast.

Now we are faced with a terrifying decision: do we actually remove the features we just spent months building?

For product leaders: How do you decide when to kill a feature, and how do you communicate that to users?

Have you ever done a "feature sunset" to save your UX? How did you handle the backlash from the users who actually liked that feature?