Strategic Product Design
The easiest way to think of what we offer is to combine in your mind the roles of a strategy department, your product management team and commercial finance group. You might even have individuals in each of these roles, but do you have a view of how they inter-relate? If you do, good for you! Just go back to the blog and leave this section for someone else ;-)
What we do is as follows:
Phase 1: Product / Customer Analysis
First, we will look establish exactly where you are today. This means a review of financial performance, clients, products, technology and expertise. Once we have a baseline understanding, we will spend time with staff to understand where individuals within the business see the available opportunities. That is your pool of ideas that you need to tap into.
This analysis and these ideas will be pulled together into an executive presentation summarising the current position and future options available to you. This phase typically lasts 5 days, day 1 is for the numbers, day 2 for the kick-off meeting and days 3-4 for one to one follow ups. Day 5 is for documentation of results.
Timekeeping at this stage is vital to ensure that this phase does not over-run and incur any more cost than is necessary. This phase will involve intense interaction with your staff. It starts with a group kick-off meeting where your management set the scope of the activity and a group brainstorm session is carried out.
To be effective, the kick-off meeting should be held after lunch, be 3 hours long (with a break), during which time all but essential operational activities should be suspended to ensure full attention of participants. In the two days immediately following this meeting, each contributor should be available for a 30-45 minute one to one follow up session.
Phase 2: Strategic Product Design
In the next phase, we will design the future product portfolio. It starts with an executive level review of the options outlined in Phase 1, which will then be fleshed out and packaged as part of the work in this phase.
The output will be a presentation for executive review of how the products will evolve over a 3 year period detailing the product strategy and the associated development timeline of each key component. This phase will be primarily desk-based work, where there will be a low requirement on your staff beyond the clarification of points made in Phase 1.
This phase typically lasts between 5 and 7 days, depending on the number of iterations that are required on top of the initial draft spec. The draft spec is due at the end of day 4 in this process.
Phase 3: Statement of Requirements
Once the high level design in phase 2 has been agreed we will carry out phase 3, which involves producing a detailed Statement of Requirements for the first year’s activities. The aim of this document is to explain in as few words as possible what needs to happen to develop the product set. This will be completed by us and your staff will be fully briefed on its contents.
This phase typically takes 10 days due to the level of detail required.
Why us?
We are qualified, but then so are thousands of consultants offering you advice. What we think is different is the combination of breadth and depth which we offer.
The breadth we offer is the range of products which we know and have experience working with (Dial-up, Broadband, Leased Lines, VPNs, MPLS, Security, Hosting, VoIP, IPTV, SaaS as well as a range of Customer Premise and Core Network Equipment). The depth we offer is our ability to see how each product component touches all parts of an organisation, from finance, through sales and marketing to engineering and operations.
We are not specialists in any one area - that is what your staff do anyway so you don't need us for that. What we offer comes back to the interconnectedness of things: we will help you see the wood for the trees.
This is not a blue-sky strategy, an interim product management assignment or a product profitability report. It's all of them in combination, showing you in simple, yet detailed terms where you are, where you want to go and how you are going to get there.
We can help. Get in touch and we can work out exactly how.
[Top]
| 
