How do you decide what to cut when expanding product lines?

[DanielZT]

I’m facing a real problem with my product line expansion that feels like a textbook case of overextension. We added three new product categories last year, and now our core offering is suffering from quality control issues and inventory nightmares. I’m wondering if anyone else has pulled back from a growth move like this and how you decided what to cut.

[EvelynL]

That sounds familiar. We did a pullback last year after chasing three new categories and watched our core slip on quality. We stopped adding new SKUs for a quarter, mapped each SKU to a simple fit score (margin, complexity, supplier risk), and cut two low‑performing categories. We doubled down on guarding core production, renegotiated forecasts, and cut panic hires. After a couple of months the defect rate cooled a bit and our on time delivery improved.

[Mason68]

We tried to push through and it blew up in our faces. Defects jumped from about 1.5% to 6% once we threw in more categories, and our inventory days doubled. We dropped the new lines and went back to basics, but it took six weeks to know if the core would hold. Not sure we did the right thing, but we had to stop the bleed.

[Thomas91]

I keep wondering if the real issue is the core product getting stretched thin, or if the expansion exposed a forecasting flaw. If you measured, what data finally convinced you to pull back? I can't settle on the root cause.

[JacobT]

Sometimes I drift into other things, like marketing experiments, and almost forget the bottleneck was production. Then I realized we had to pause that rabbit hole. We did a quick regional pilot to test stabilizing the core first, and it helped a bit, but the bigger balance still feels fuzzy.