Saving a Dying Product: Escaping the Fear Loop
Inheriting a failing product can be intimidating, surrounded by voices filled with doubts and previous failures: "Do we have enough data?", "What if we lose users?", "Didn’t we try this before?"This is the Fear Loop - where product teams hesitate, innovation stalls, and products fade away. In this session, I'll share my firsthand experience of reviving a dying product, revealing practical techniques for diagnosing issues quickly, navigating organizational pushback, and building momentum to achieve
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Saving a Dying Product: Escaping the Fear Loop
Most product managers dream of launching something new, not inheriting something broken. But what happens when you take over a product that is failing or one that used to grow and is now declining? In her talk at Just Product, Orly Stern Izhaki shared a raw and relatable side of product management: how to handle products in trouble, rebuild confidence, and lead your team through uncertainty.
The Hidden Side of Product Management
Product management looks glamorous on LinkedIn: new launches, promotions, and successful turnarounds. Yet behind the scenes, every product leader will eventually face a crisis. When Orly joined Wix in 2022, the product had just come out of the COVID boom. Restaurants were reopening, customers shifted back from online ordering to in-person dining, and growth collapsed. Inside the company, people whispered that the product might be shut down. The team was confused, anxious, and stuck in what Orly calls the fear loop, a state where teams either freeze and overanalyze or rush into random actions just to show progress.
Instead of reacting, Orly and her team paused to truly understand the problem. They discovered three main issues: high demand at the top of the funnel, a broken and outdated infrastructure from an old startup acquisition, and poor product quality leading to churn. The team had three options: rebuild from scratch, refactor gradually, or fix only small issues.
Many assumed that rebuilding everything would be too risky. Orly, however, knew the legacy code was beyond repair. To get the team’s buy-in, she split them into groups to argue for each option and present risks, timelines, and expected outcomes. By debating openly, the team reached a shared decision: a full rebuild on Wix’s modern platform. One year later, the product had not only recovered but had become a model for other teams across the company.
The Next Challenge: Turning Around Onboarding at Payoneer
Two years later, Orly joined Payoneer, a global fintech company operating in one hundred ninety countries. Among her new responsibilities was the company’s most broken process: customer onboarding. It was both a growth bottleneck and a compliance nightmare. Several failed attempts to fix it had eroded trust, and management gave Orly two weeks to propose a plan.
Instead of rushing to deliver quick answers, she took time to study what had gone wrong before, learn from past attempts, and rebuild confidence step by step. Within a few months, her team launched a new onboarding MVP that improved conversion rates, reduced operational costs, and maintained strict compliance requirements. More importantly, the process restored faith in the team’s ability to deliver results.
Escaping the Fear Loop: Six Principles for Product Turnarounds
From these experiences, Orly distilled six principles every product manager should keep in their toolbox for tough times:
- Take time to diagnose before acting. Spend most of your energy understanding the real problem instead of rushing into solutions.
- Use data wisely. Combine quantitative and qualitative data, but avoid analysis paralysis. Know when enough is enough.
- Define what success looks like. Make sure everyone, from the team to executives, agrees on the same definition of success early on.
- Involve all relevant stakeholders. Get the right people in the room early, from legal and compliance to marketing and operations.
- Break the solution into small experiments. Release incremental wins to boost morale, learn fast, and buy time with management.
- Communicate relentlessly. Overcommunicate progress, learnings, and roadblocks. Stakeholders can be unhappy with you, but they should never be surprised.
Leading Through Fear
Orly closed her talk with a powerful reminder: fear is natural. Every product manager will face a failing product at some point in their career. What matters is how you respond. Understanding the problem, engaging your team, and communicating constantly will help you lead through fear instead of being paralyzed by it.
As Orly put it:
“It’s okay to fear, but you still have to lead the product and your team.”
Orly Stern Izhaki
Orly Stern Izhaki is a seasoned product leader with senior roles at Payoneer and Wix, where she led large-scale product transformations and turnaround strategies. With deep experience in scaling products globally, she specializes in reviving struggling products, navigating organizational complexity, and driving growth under pressure. At Just Product 2025, Orly shares her firsthand experience of breaking the Fear Loop and leading a product from decline to renewed success.