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Strategizing, Roadmapping and Executing the Product Line

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Operational Excellence and Product Strategy

Numerous advancements in innovation management and new product development have been made over the last few decades. Many of us with dedicated careers in this arena have seen one management approach after another find their way into our processes, methods and practices. Sometimes, though, the mingling of these approaches has proven to be problematic. This is particularly true when tackling the topic of product line strategy.

A common mistake some managers make is substituting operational excellence for product line strategy. This mistake presents an important topic because it goes to the very essence of wellbeing of a business. Plus, exploring the differences and relationships between these two topics provides a good starting point to bring greater clarity to the lessor understood topic of product line strategy.

Almost every company that I have worked with has significant efforts underway to improve operational excellence. Perhaps the most notable are activities that start with “lean” in their title. The lean movement has been very successful in its objective of delivering value and reducing waste. This is the core principle underlying operational excellence. “Lean” was introduced in 2003 by Womack and Jones in their book “Lean Thinking.”1 Now, to their credit, there is hardly a company in the world which has not pursued operational excellence derived from lean initiatives. However, the problem is that while operational excellence is necessary in business, it is not sufficient, in and of itself, to form a product line strategy.

Product line strategy is rooted in creating advantage over competitors.2 “Lean” or operational excellence, on the other hand, is the efficient and waste-minimized execution of

work. Presumably, the work is related to a smart strategy. But this is where the two approaches often run counter to one another. For some organizations, a concerted effort toward operational excellence is, by itself, their strategy. This might seem prudent, but the notion of strategic advantage is lost with this approach.

Whether obvious or not, every competitor in every industry focuses on operational excellence. In today’s business climate, efforts toward operational excellence are a “given.” Can companies sustain an advantage in product offerings by “out-leaning” all competitors? Sure, this may work temporarily. However, this approach reminds me of the Red Queens Race in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. The Red Queen captures the ludicrous notion of continually out-leaning competitors when she says, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Operational excellence should support a strategy, not be a strategy. For most of us, strategy is a heady topic. Recognizing that product line strategy and operational excellence are not the same is a very important first step. In this whitepaper, I explore and share my understanding of product line strategy. This includes a battle-tested approach toward thinking through strategies, and fully recognizing the differences among product line strategies, business strategies and corporate strategies. In addition, I also hope to convey the important insight that product line strategy is vacant without good planning and strong execution.

It is the combination of smart strategy creation, insightful planning and superb cross-organizational execution that separates the inmarket winners from second- and third-tier players.


The Four Levers of Advantage

At first glance, the four lever model in strategy seems too simplistic to be of any value in product line strategy. However, the insights gained from this model can be particularly valuable once the strategist explores the nuances related to specific product and market situations.

Viewing the four levers from the vantage point of a single new product helps shed light on the topic. Most product developers would recognize these levers as categories of attributes of the product in the market or products to be developed. Think, for example, of using tools and methods such as QFD or conjoint analysis to help pinpoint the optimal set of attributes for a product to win within a certain market segment. If we determine the best set of attributes, we then may categorize these attributes under each lever. For each individual product, it is the attribute set that matters not the categories or levers.

However, product lines are different. For a line of multiple products, each attribute set will be unique for each product. Across the product line, it is the common attributes and their collective influence on all buying behavior that matters most. This is particularly true when

the attractiveness of the attribute to the buyer is amplified because of the more impactful common leverage gained across the full product line. Such common levers are what enable the product line to achieve a degree of competitive advantage.

Therefore, strong product line strategies require sharp insights about the common attribute set... the levers. However, the degree of leverage is dependent upon the behavior of customers. This means that product line strategy effectiveness is also conditional upon smart groupings of customers (market segmentation) in relationships to delivery of common attributes (platforms and building blocks).

Four Levers

At the simplest level, there are four advantages or levers, each in the context of the market and competition.3 that can be exploited in a product line strategy:

• attribute performance/quality• variety of the offering• speed relative to competition• price/cost-in-use

Figure 1 above depicts the four levers of strategic advantage.

The challenge that product line strategists face is that each advantage is in trade-off with the other advantages. This is true, at least to some degree, for all situations. Go faster and you may sacrifice some quality. Cut cost and you may kill some variety. Good product line strategy typically seeks to focus on one or two of the four levers. A focus on three of the levers is doable, but very challenging. Pushing simultaneously on all four levers, however, is often a path to failure.4

Unfortunately, the four-lever product line strategy affords no tradeoff. As a result, each

FIGURE 1: Four Levers of Strategic Advantage over Competitors


advantage will be sub-optimized and vulnerable to the competitive response. And it is the competitive response that provides the most insight to this simple strategy framework. If a competitor is offering attribute superiority and quality (in the eyes of the customer), a possible strategic move is to out-speed and/or out-low cost them.

Perhaps one of the most notable strategic moves to beat competitors -- and one that exemplifies the basic four-lever strategy framework -- was carried out by the American steel producer Nucor during the 1970s and ‘80s. At the time, there was incredible competition in the United States, not only among domestic integrated steel mills, but also from huge foreign mills. These huge, capital intensive companies were pushing as hard as they could on all four strategy levers. However, it amounted to a near death spiral among them. Nucor, though, chose to follow a different strategy. Instead of creating massive steel mills, they created mini mills. Instead of creating steel from iron ore, they chose to use scrap metal as the raw material.

Betting big on a converting technology known as thin slab casting, Nucor shifted its product line to highly profitable sheet metal for the automotive industry. By doing so, Nucor greatly undercut the cost of sheet metal coming from integrated mills. Perhaps equally important to Nucor was the speed at which they were able to out-maneuver the competition. Big integrated mills simply could not make decisions and take actions as fast as Nucor. In this case, Nucor stepped up with a focus on low cost and speed specific to sheet metal, delivered adequate quality and shunned variety. Their market share in the profitable sheet metal segment shot up, and return on assets dwarfed the integrated steel mills. In hindsight, the strategy was genius.

Components of Organization Focus for Leveraging Strategic Advantage

Creating and executing a common focus across an organization is an essential element of product line strategy. Without it, just as without a platform, there is no leverage. There are several key influences that a product line strategist may use to create the desired organizational focus:

• organizational structure;• key skills and talents;• communication and reporting;• process decision flows;• project management;• process workflows;• policies and rules;• screening criteria;• portfolio mix ratios;• resource management;• supply chain management;• rewards and bonuses;• information systems; and• metrics.

These influences may be divided into the layers of the strategy fulcrum below.

FIGURE 2: Product Line Strategy Fulcrum


Organizational Focus Specific to Product Line Strategy

Executing Strategy

The obvious challenge in product line strategy is choosing which advantage to leverage and what platforms and technology building blocks to use. However, this is not as great a challenge as is the execution of the strategy. Execution of the product line strategy requires management teams to create a coordinated focus on the chosen advantage lever(s), connected directly to those lower managers who then must lead purposeful project work specific to the strategy. Such focus and connectivity are fundamental to strategy execution. In my way of thinking about product line strategy, this organizational focus serves as the fulcrum of a leveraged advantage (See Figure 2). Once this fulcrum and a corresponding platform are in place, managers can then use operational excellence as a driving force to lift the weight of competitive markets.

Figure 3 provides a visual model combining organizational focus, platforms and strategy-related forces. It depicts a teeter-totter like leverage of a product line platform. A smart product line strategy will tailor the fulcrum (organizational focus and project-to-strategy connectivity), the lever (product line platform and building blocks), and the positiveforces (operational excellence and customer wants) specifically to overcome the negative forces (competitive offerings and internal cultural inertia). This is product line strategy.

Execution is fundamental to whether a product line strategy is effective or just a burden to those doing work. The first task in product strategy formulation, therefore, is to understand the forces existing in the current state related to possible alternative platforms.

FIGURE 3: Product Platform Leverage

Product Line Platform

Competitive Force

Consumer Wants & Needs

Operational Excellence

Cultural Inertia


Table 1 sheds some light on what these forces may be. My approach to this task is to segment the forces into four groups: Operational Excellence, Customer Influences, External and Competitive Affects, and Cultural Inertia. This helps to organize insights related to the forces. The next step is simply to determine whether the forces should be driven harder, mitigated, or altered in some way.

The nuances of each force and how they relate to the desired product line strategy matter greatly. This may be best explained by examining the forces I refer to as “cultural inertia.” Just like the principle in physics, the inertia of the organization’s culture relates to the forces within an organization that resist desired behavior.5 The specifics of this challenge will always be unique to each organization.

Issues that I confronted with a recent client illustrate the challenge of cultural inertia. The client is a global manufacturing company, serving industrial markets with strong production platforms and serving institutional markets with newly inherited service platforms. Through acquisitions, they built international

operations in Europe and North America and also took over several new production and service platforms. The client’s challenge was that, like most Asian companies, their culture was oriented toward being the lowest cost producer. This meant that behavior of middle managers was always driven by an end goal of realizing lower costs.

In-depth consulting diagnostics revealed that practices and methods within the client organization always emphasized low cost. While it was admirable that the firm had grown and flourished by embracing an orientation toward cost, the cultural inertia to an innovation-oriented strategy and toward developing higher-value products was considerable. Top management preached that “investments” in new products were desirable. Even so, middle management perceived new product projects as cost centers, not investments. In fact, the practices and methods the organization used to evaluate a new product focused on the cost of the project, not the gain from the resultant new product. Simply put, the inertia of the organization pushed in the exact opposite direction of a desired emphasis on new product development.

Operational Excellence Customer InfluencesExternal Influences:

Competitive Actions, Barriers, Supply Chain, Regulatory

Internal Cultural Inertia and Operational Entropy

Typically Positive Force Typically Positive Force Typically Negative Force Typically Negative Force

Lean practices Specific needs, wants and desires Product introductions Behaviors

NPD practices (e.g., VOC, FMEA, QFD, Beta Testing, DFM, Conjoint Analysis,

Concept generation)

Perceptions of offering: superiority quality, value

Competitive product introductions

Misdirected rewards and punishments

Portfolio management practices

Customer behavior: purchase intent, propensity

to changeIntellectual property, patent

barriersKnowledge, lack of correct

information and data

Project management practices Price sensitivity Competitive pricing,

advertising, deal makingLack of skills and

capabilities

Platform specific skills, talents and capabilities Dedication to platform Supplier power distributor

power Conflicting strategies

Risk assessment and mitigation actions

Current customer satisfaction Labor costs, unions Conflicting organizational

structure

TABLE 1: Some of the forces influencing platform leverage


Platforms Types

Platforms empower “leverage” in the creation, production and/or sale of related products. There are five types of platforms used in product line strategies. The platform may be used by itself (singularly) or with other platforms (in combination).

The five platform types are:

Design Platform: A common component or set of components of all products within a product line. For example a common motherboard may be used in many different yet related computers.

Production Platform: An efficient and rapid production capability, whether manual or automated, targeting specific end result characteristics such as low cost, high variety or superb quality. Examples would be papermaking machines, assembly lines, and canning lines.

Service Platform: An efficient delivery of one or more service such as banking services, design services, “customization” services, labor services, design-to-order, job shop production and expert advice services.

Brand Platform: A recognizable (visual or audible) component which establishes a perception in the minds of consumers increasing the desirability of purchasing/consuming the product.

System Platform: A base component upon which the owner is able to extend utility (value-in-use). Examples would include Windows operating systems, Google, wireless telephone systems, and financial integrations.

Product Line Platforms

The platform is at the core of product line strategy, providing leverage and advantage to the product line. Or, if you wish to look at it differently, a platform enables an organization to realize a greater gain from the product line than just the investment made into each individual product. This sounds terrific, but it is sometimes difficult to understand fully. Our challenge is that product line strategy is a business art form, not a science. While we use facts and statistics to figure out a product line strategy, explaining the notion of strategy, platforms and advantage requires we often use metaphors, draw visual models and employ critical, creative and complex thinking.6

For most organizations, the first task of product line strategizing is to determine what platforms exist and whether these platforms actually provide sufficient leverage to win against competitors. The fundamental test as to whether something is a platform is to determine if it enables an advantage over the competition. Indeed, product strategist will quickly augment this question with a creative exploration of how market segments can be rationalized and manipulated to assure advantage. They will also look at how technology building blocks might augment platforms to yield advantage within certain segments. This undertaking is the central order of business for a new start-up.

However, for large, mature companies, tackling the question of platform definitions and gaining leverage in strategy can be challenging. Platforms can be difficult to think through. For some, every object that relates to a product line may look like a platform. This is nonsensical though. For example, for one of my clients, I had the challenge of explaining that market segments are not platforms. The simple test of whether something can be a platform is to ask if the item yields leverage.


Without a clear understanding of product strategy, several top managers within the client organization were using the word “platform” simply to label a market segment as being important. Through the use of the word platform, these managers revealed their strategy as “focusing on the most important segments.” As excellent marketers, they perceived that the key to their strategy was to focus on the correct market segment. This is good. But where is the leverage? Without leverage, a strategy is incomplete and highly vulnerable to competition.

When the president of the business unit within the client organization began referring to markets as platforms, I was left scrambling for a new name. My choice was to introduce a fuller understanding of product line strategy and the notion of leverage by using a new term of “levers” instead of platforms. This was awkward for me, but for client organization, it worked perfectly.

Good Platforms, Bad Platforms7

Product strategists have been addressing the role of product line platforms for several decades. Today, the key challenge is with establishing a construct both for thinking through the viability of platforms and for planning and executing work related to platforms. The teeter-totter leverage and the organizational fulcrum shared in Figure 3 go a long way toward creating this construct. However, one issue that product strategists confront and, which is not depicted in the teeter-totter model, is that platforms cannot be graded as passfail or on-off. Rather, platforms need to be assessed by the degree of leverage they deliver and the ability of the organization to execute strategies with them. And while something may easily be recognized as a platform, it does not mean it is a good platform.

Consider some basics about platforms. My observations point to five fundamental platform archetypes (see the side box on page 7).8 These archetypes are sufficiently different enough from one another that each requires a unique organizational focus (the fulcrum for leverage) and a distinct manner of operational excellence driving force. Equally important, the degree of leverage that can be realized from each platform will be notably different depending on organizational focus, competition and market behaviors.

Strategic leverage is a conceptual measure of a platform. It provides us with a yardstick of worth or attractiveness of a platform within a product line strategy. Think of this as a scale from extremely attractive to not attractive at all. The more attractive the leverage of a platform, the more value it creates in product line strategy. In my thinking, the measureof strategic leverage is made up of many dimensions. I do not have an empirically proven algorithm that product strategist can validate the strategic leverage of a platform. Rather,

Greater Value Lessor Value

Physical Asset or Software ↔ Intangible Asset

Discrete Technology ↔ Knowledge (Core Competency)

Patent / Copyright (Proprietary) ↔ No Legal Rights

Differentiate / Uniqueness ↔ Non-differentiated

Superior Attributes ↔ Me-too

Economic Advantage ↔ Parity in Value

Broad Market Appeal ↔ Narrow Niche

Extendible (able to add value) ↔ Single offering

TABLE 2: Factors for valuing a platform


Table 2 shares eight factors that, based on my experience, help address the comparative leverage of one platform against another.

The challenge when evaluating the leverage of a platform is that each contributing dimension of leverage is situational to each business, within each competitive environment. The valuation should tie directly to whether the organization can execute it, not to just a hope of executing it. Product strategists will also find that the dimensions can be in tradeoff with one another. For example, as attempts are made to gain greater breadth of market appeal in an offering, the product strategist may as well see a decreased perception toward product performance.

Product strategists quickly realize that one platform is inherently better than another platform. Indeed, just because a platform exists does not mean it is a good platform. There are good platforms, bad platforms and many in between. My experience leads me to believe that most platforms are either mediocre or poor relative to competition. This is because in product line strategy, the game is always about having a better platform than that being exploited by competition. While the product strategist goal should be to go ahead and stay ahead of competition, not everyone will be the leader.

Assessing platforms is made more complex because there is no such thing as a static platform. Over time, platforms will and should morph. Customer needs change, technologies change, supply chain economics change and product life cycles mature. This is true for all competitors. The result is that product strategies must be dynamic. Simply establishing a product line strategy and its core platform is not sufficient in the game of product competition. Organizations also need a mechanism of platform renewal and regeneration. To stay in the game, the platform and its value must be examined and reexamined periodically. As we will see later, this is what product line road mapping is all about.

Design Platforms and Strategic Advantage

Exploring the what’s and why’s of design platforms helps build an understanding of platforms and their importance in product line strategy.9 We interact with design platforms every day in products all around us. Computers, cell phones, small appliances, and automobiles are just a few product types that use the important product line strategy concept of platforms. From a design perspective, a platform is a set of shared elements, often referred to as a product architecture that cuts across the line or family of products.

The design platform, because it is common across multiple products, can be scaled in production to a higher degree than possible for any single product. Product variety can then be increased quickly and simply by adding new modules or features. Notice the strategic levers being addressed by design platforms: cost (through scale), speed (through reuse and familiarity), variety (through modular addition), and performance/quality (presuming a robust design). But most importantly, through the addition of technology building blocks, the platform enables such levers to play out across a family of products.

As examples of design platforms, consider a line of automobiles with a common engine, or a line of computers with a common motherboard. Each common element can be a platform. One of the advantages of newly developed platforms is that their cost may be amortized over a larger number of products, spanning a greater length of time then can be offered by just one of the products in the product line. This affords a more significant investment than if every product was designed from scratch. Here, product line strategists must augment their thinking about the life or life cycle of the platform, not just the life cycle of one product within the product line.


Platforms and Competencies

Creating and executing platforms requires organizations to have very strong competencies. Considerable thought and hard work are needed for design platforms to be powerful strategically. Often, new platforms call on new technologies never before put into practice. Sometimes the technical side of new design platforms might come together through a quick flash of brilliance. Frequently, it is the result of many flashes of brilliance plus concerted effort through trial and error. The task is not easy, even when the resulting platform seems simple. In product line strategy, the thought or concept of a design may be wonderful. However, it is the heavy lifting of execution, which turns out to be the most important contributor to success.

Talented engineers and marketers recognize the tradeoffs associated with delivering against cost, quality and functional requirements. At the same time, they must also deal with supply chain challenges and opportunities, manufacturing process engineering, and platform interface management. Equally challenging is the task of figuring out whether the platform and resultant family of potential products will beat the competition in targeted markets. In other words, there can be numerous difficult and interrelated factors.

All organizations eventually need to address the execution challenge of developing a new platform. Managers will recognize that the more complex and diverse the challenges of creation, sourcing and manufacturing of a new platform, the greater the need for strong collaborative team work and intelligent project-focused leadership. The usual human-resource problem is that all of the needed skills for new platform development cannot be simply hired off the street. Often it requires many years of experience with and learning from both successes and failures across all essential components of design and development. In addition, for the platform to be exploited successfully, building blocks must be added to the platform quickly and efficiently. Who else is better suited to carry out such product line extension than those that created the platform?

The bottom line to platform development is that deeply insightful and skilled individuals working collaboratively are incredibly valuable. While most product line strategists would wish to focus more on technology and market issues, new platform development almost always requires strong teamwork and human-resource management.

The life cycle of the platform is especially important when an organization designs a platform and scales it to serve global markets. Product strategists will often recognize that different market segments may extend the life of the platform much longer than any one segment. For the underlying strategy this may be either good or bad. Good that it extends the life, bad because it may delay the creation of a desperately needed new platform.

Creating new design platforms, though, can often be a timeconsuming and risky proposition. Boeing’s development of the new 787 Dreamliner is a good, albeit very large, example. Design of the new platform began in early 2003 and delivery of the first commercial version was scheduled for four years later. The value proposition of the platform was straight forward: 20% lower costs of operation plus it can fly farther than competitive alternatives. Unfortunately, the complexity of the development caused completion to take twice as long as expected, development costs to sky rocket, and the initial design parameters related to weight reduction to not be delivered.

The launch of the 787 platform, like most new platform launches, delivered only one version of the Dreamliner. Future plans call for a total of four variants in the product


line to address different market segments’ needs related to distance flown and passenger capacity. Boeing’s hope is to break even on the $2.5 to $3 billion development costs and capital expenditures within ten years of launch. Other analysts suggest that breakeven will not occur until 23 years after launch.10 Nonetheless, these costs are sunk and there is no going back on the platform now. Obviously, the Boeing 787 is larger than most new platform developments. However, it also exemplifies the larger opportunity and corresponding higher risk an organization may face with new platforms.

Beyond Design Platforms

Not all product line strategies call for design platforms. A case in point was Nucor, mentioned previously. Nucor set up the mini-mill platform to compete against the integrated steel mill platform. From a product line strategy point of view, the minimill production was the platform that yielded the cost advantage in the market. The reason that product platforms are so powerful is that good platforms deliver competitive advantage across the product line. While a single product may create a point of differentiated advantage, the platform should create a set of points across the product line, or as it is also called, a “vector” of differentiated advantage.11

Smart product line strategies often boil down to smart platform strategies, specifically adding technology building blocks to match product attributes to market needs and wants. For example, Nucor employed the mini mill as a platform and then added a technology as a building block so as to deliver the correct attributes of profitable sheet metal. The technology building block was a converting technology called thin slab casting. The thin slabs enabled Nucor to reduce greatly their cost of rolling the slabs into sheets at a relatively low cost. Meanwhile, integrated mills used scale to

produce standard “large” slabs which, for sheets, required considerably more costly rolling.

The spark of insight for Nucor was seeing how the combination of the mini mill (the platform), and the thin slab casting technology (a technology building block) would lower costs of sheets. The interesting part of this is that both the platform and the technology building block were known to all the competitors for several years. Each competitor had the same pieces of the strategy puzzle available to them but did not, or was not able to, do anything with them. Surprisingly, this is quite common. Often most, if not all, pieces of the product line strategy puzzle are known to all competitive players. What matters is who has the key insights that glue the pieces together and whether they are capable of executing the correct projects and programs based on these insights.

In 1998, I observed this flash insight occur for the Vice President of R&D at CibaVision, a division at the time of the Swiss company Ciba-Giegy. CibaVision was one of a handful of manufacturers of soft contact lenses. The Vice President was in attendance at one of my consulting firm’s benchmarking summits on product development processes. Six large companies were participating in the two-day event.

Early in the morning on the second day, the Vice President was seated at the U-shaped table waiting for things to start up. He was very relaxed sipping his coffee and reading the Wall Street Journal. There was silence in the room when all of a sudden he murmured seemingly random profanity, obviously a call to others to ask what caused the chosen words. The profanity, he explained, was his verbalization of an incredible insight.

Apparently, the VP had just read an article announcing how Johnson & Johnson, through its Acuvue division, was beginning a billion-dollar construction project on a plant intended to produce contact lenses. Consumers, the


article said, were expected to buy these contacts for $1 per pair and throw them away at the end of each day. This was the advent of disposable contacts lenses. It turns out, the key to the new disposable lens was a manufacturing process that had, for several years, been marched around to every player in the contact lens business. The technology had come out of Eastern Europe and everyone in the industry knew of it.

What Johnson & Johnson realized – their brilliant insight – was that the variable cost of materials for contact lenses was minuscule, with a fraction of an ounce of polymer and a high percentage by weight of water. If the technology was scaled sufficiently, the variable cost of each set of lenses would be low enough to enable a price for consumers to be willing to replace them every day. Consumers would not need to buy cleaning solution and saline, nor would they have to spend time delicately cleaning their lenses each night.

And how big was the required scale? It had to be scaled large enough to capture over two-thirds of the potential market, while providing the variety needed to fulfill market requirements. Once the first company had made the investment, no other competitor could scale to be large enough to compete profitably. So long as the additional insights gained from extensive voice of the customer proved out that consumers wanted daily wear contact lenses, Johnson & Johnson’s would dominate the contact lens market.

The CibaVision Vice President’s profanity revealed his insight that his company was about to be tattooed strategically by the competition. In subsequent years, CibaVision had to move aggressively into a new platform addressing extended wear contacts. The other major competitor, Bausch & Lomb, filed for bankruptcy. In this case, once again, all the pieces of the strategic puzzle were available to all of the players. The difference was that Johnson & Johnson generated the strategic insight that

glued the pieces of the strategic puzzle together. They then executed a development project on a scale that most companies find difficult even to talk about. Perhaps the CibaVision Vice President’s profanity was justified.

Insights and Platforms

One of the more difficult challenges for product line strategists is that sometimes companies do not know or do not have an agreement across the organization on what the platforms might or should be. This is problematic because without knowledge or agreement on platforms, it is impossible to reach a common focus for product line strategies. Consider Lucent Technologies, now part of the French company Alcatel. In 1996, several years after the deregulation of the telephone industry, AT&T spun off the famous Bell Laboratory into what was known as Lucent Technologies. For several years, Lucent merely operated in the same manner as Bell Labs by providing support and service to the independent Bell Operating companies. By the late 1990s though, the competitive dynamics changed substantially.

On and off over several years, I provided consulting services to Lucent--primarily around the premise that Lucent needed to become customer- and market-oriented in their product development activities. This made perfect sense because they had always been a captive supplier, but after deregulation of the telecom industry they needed to serve independent customers and deal with market competitors. It was a whole new world to Lucent. The state of the art in product development at the time emphasized staged development process and cross-functional teaming; building a market orientation into the process each step of the way.

In one of my engagements with Lucent it was necessary to roll out a market-oriented product development training course for team leaders. When I asked how many leaders would be going


through the course, I received a reply “we’re not sure.” After a few weeks, the answer came in. The group at Lucent believed there would be approximately 2,600 team leaders needing the training. Really, how could that be? Two thousand six hundred was 50 to 100 times what I would normally see, even in big companies. What in the world was I missing?

What I did not understand was that nearly every sale that Lucent made to a customer became a product development project. For example, if a sale of a new switching station was made to PacTel, it became a project or if a sale of a full phone system was made to the country of Vietnam, it was a program and within it were many projects. Every project had a leader who needed training. However, the real insight here was about the design-to-order nature of Lucent’s business. Each sale required the customized integration of multiple telephony components.

In effect, Lucent was one of the largest job shops in the world. Even so, not once did any member of Lucent’s management team describe the organization as being in a service business--delivering customized integration of telephony components. Product platforms

were described as telephony components, such as switches and interfaces, not as the delivery of service. Markets were defined by customer types, not by integration needs. This is what Lucent’s management team wanted to shift focus to. Upon interviewing a few project managers, though, the desired market orientation seemed difficult to convey.

All of the project managers were focused on one customer at a time; each customer with a complex set of requirements. In the management team’s view, the telephony components were the platforms. However, in the project manager’s view, the integration service was the platform, and the telephony components were the building blocks.

For the product line strategist, the question was whether Lucent was in the telephony component business or the systems integration business. How could you think through a product line strategy at any level without having an answer to this question? With the dominance of the “market orientation” challenge, the notion of a service-delivery platform was totally absent from the thinking presented by Lucent’s management team. All eyes were fixed on

Supporting P

roducts

Life C

ycles

Introductory Stage

Growth Stage Maturity Stage Decline Stage

Platform

Life C

ycle

Total Sales

TimeFIGURE 4: All platforms have life cycles, just as all products have lifecycles.


the need to become market orientated. In hindsight, it is impossible to say whether a shift in platform strategy from product to service would have been more powerful for Lucent. What is known though, is that there was never agreement on a focus of product platforms directed at markets. If different managers and different functions have differing ideas as to what the platform is, then a coordinated organizational focus and resultant strategic leverage are unlikely. Without a common focus there could be no “fulcrum” to enable leverage of a platform.

The results for Lucent were not good. After only ten years in existence, Lucent’s survival move was to merge with their French competitor Alcatel. For those who observe high-tech industry changes, it may also be of interest to learn that the woman who headed up Lucent’s effort to develop a strong market orientation and eschew the service platform was a vice president by the name of Carly Fiorina.12

Choose, Don’t Accept Outcomes

When product strategists put into play any one of the platform archetypes, they are seeking to deliver at least one of the four basic levers to the product line. This desired outcome is the product line strategy. Whether it is to realize advantage from speed, price, performance/quality, variety or some combination thereof, the platform archetype is just a tool to achieve the outcome.

Previously, I made the argument that the dreaded four-lever strategy is a trap that strategist should avoid. Unfortunately, often by default and not by choice, product strategists find themselves fighting the symptomatic fires of the four-lever strategy. But there is an exception to this case which, when understood, helps illuminate the challenge of creating and executing product line strategies. This exception is when organizations create new offerings for newly defined markets

with newly formed platforms. Since by definition no competition exists in new markets, no competitive response to the four-lever strategy will occur; at least not for a period of time. This can be quite powerful. This concept in strategy is known as “Blue Ocean Strategy.”13 It seeks to create uncontested market space in order to break away from the competitive dilemmas of the four-lever strategy.

But the vast majority of product line strategies do not focus on creating both new markets and new platforms. Rather, most product line strategies deal with existing markets and existing platforms. Nonetheless, even though pursuing the elusive four-lever strategy is exactly wrong when dealing with existing markets and existing platforms, by default, it is the approach many product strategists end up taking.

All too often the only criterion a product management team will use to screen out a potential new offering is whether or not it has a chance of making money. If a wild guess net present value is positive for the new opportunity, the new product project will be put into the queue. There is no set of criteria or product line strategy shaping policy. In essence, organizations may have no means to say “no” to projects pushing the ill advised four-lever strategy or to require projects to connect to a sound product line strategy. In fact, it is most common to diverge from a sound product line strategy simply because a customer requests a product that forces the strategy in this direction.

Whether in business-to-business or consumer products markets, you will hear the voice of the customer say things like “I will give you the order if you improve the quality and sell it to me cheaper,” or “Can you give me these other variations at the same price?” To the sales and product development department, this may seem like low-hanging fruit. However, following such direction can yield serious negative consequences.Suffice it to say, if you cannot say “no” to a customer, then you do not have a product line strategy. Consider Starbucks, for example. Imagine


a customer walking into a Starbucks and asking for a sushi roll. If the manager really believed the philosophy “the customer is always right,” he’d order the barista to move aside the skinny lattes and become a sushi chef. Now imagine the added challenge of buying and storing raw fish, or hiring and training barista sushi chefs, or the effect on service speed. Without a spark of significant creative insight to enable the barista-sushi model, the strategy is without legs. Here, adding the advantage lever of variety through the offer of sushi could prove quite harmful. At some point, Starbucks, like all other companies, must simply say “no” to customers if they wish to remain focused strategically.

Organizational Focus Enables Leverage

Simple logic suggests a very significant principle in product line strategy: having common agreement on what the platform is, is more important than the platform itself. The reason is straight forward. An organization needs first to gain a shared focus in order to achieve leverage in a product line strategy. This shared focus is what enables the fulcrum to platform leverage. If the leverage is to come from a product or service platform, then it is best to share an understanding of what it is. While this may sound trite, my experience with numerous clients is that few have a shared understanding of their product platforms.

A common exercise I conduct with client teams is first to explain product platforms and then ask each team member to list individually the platforms they know of across their product line. The exercise is intended to show the differences between the team members, which, if I have judged the situation correctly, is notable. As the team works through the differences about platforms, the discussion is directed to “so what the heck is our focus?” And without focus, “how are we guiding our operational excellence efforts for a desired strategic outcome?”

The platform-to-focus challenge is always exacerbated as platforms move through their life cycle. This is because as a platform matures, more and more building blocks will be added to it to extend its value farther and farther. At the same time, multiple platforms may, or can be, morphed together. The net result is that sharpness of focus is lost and, in the end, the platform can be difficult even to identify. A platform in decline is a platform that no longer yields an advantage. By the very nature of the maturing platform, competitive advantage will evaporate along with sales and profit margins.

As platforms mature and product lines extend, there is a tendency for organizations to create more and more variants of an offering. However, at the same time, cost, performance/quality and speed will be pushed harder and harder. This is the dreaded four-lever strategy. The dilemma lies with the maturing nature of a single platform. The focus and full momentum of the organization are geared to extend the platform in any possible manner. That is what people in the organization are skilled to do. That is what processes are set up to do. And, that is what existing assets are in place to do. Extending the platform into a four-lever strategy is very much a symptom of platform maturity. This is where organizations make the biggest product line strategy mistake.

In response to platform maturity dynamics, many organizations lean out their development and production capabilities with a mantra of ‘do more with less.’ Essentially, they double-down on the four-lever strategy. The recourse is obvious, yet also quite difficult: create a new platform and/or new market. Unfortunately, by taking a double-down lean approach, the organization finds itself without either the capacity or the skills to create a new platform or find a new market. In a sense, through their best intensions and doing what they are designed to do, the organization just leaned themselves out of a future.


Corporate, Business and Product Line Strategy

The mature platform dilemma points out the important interface of product line strategy with overarching business strategy. Shifting focus from one platform to another or creating entirely new platforms is the substance of business strategy. Extending the product line is the substance of product line strategy and can be considered a tactical element of a business strategy. It is, no doubt, difficult to conduct meaningful product line strategy without the focus of business strategy.

The tactics-tostrategy relationship is best described by the ancient Chinese military general Sun Tzu’s statement “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” Alternatively, perhaps the point is made more clearly by Peter Drucker with his statement, “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”

A well communicated business strategy is the life blood of smart product line strategy. However, the further down the organizational chart one is from the top, the less clarity there is about higher-level strategies. Think about the extent of hierarchy within some organizations. It can go from Corporate to division, to business unit, to product line, to the product, as seen in figure 5. For some organizations, additional levels like product category and geographic groupings may also be present.

There is a notable and sensible divide between corporate and business strategies. Corporate strategies are mostly visional and motivational in nature.14 From the corporate level, you’ll read vision statements that use phrases like “be the leader” or “serving society.” Their intent is to define purpose and to motivate action. They are not about competitive actions and proactive tactics.Business Unit strategies are directed at the “what” and “how” of competition. These strategies should direct an organization toward the desired market segments to be pursued and the platforms that should be leveraged, and how skills should

FIGURE 5 Strategy Hierarchy


be built and operational excellence is to be focused. Good management at the business unit level needs to call out the decisions and actions intended to win in specific markets.

Seldom do business strategies depend solely on product line strategies as the means of competition. However, it is difficult to think of a sound business strategy that does not call upon a smart product line strategy. Smart product line strategies are requisite for good business strategies.

The Strategy Gap

Should higher level strategies really matter to the product manager? Yes, they should. Unfortunately, few product managers can articulate the strategies created higher up the organizational chart. Instead, they see a myriad of actions and decisions, the summation of which I refer to as the “default strategy.” Often the default strategy does not reflect an intended business strategy. The difference or gap between the default strategy and the intended business strategy is enormously important to note. This gap is a function of inadequate planning, communication and execution of the components of organizational focus. The problem with a notable strategy gap is that it also sets up a typical response by the product line strategist: to embrace the ‘do more with less’ operational excellence mantra and the hapless pursuit of the four-lever product line strategy. In other words, the gap can cause the failure of what might seem to be an intelligent product line strategy.

Aligning product development to product line strategy and to the other elements of business strategy is critical to effective bottom-line performance. This is increasingly true in today’s global business environment. Many business strategies have morphed into what some refer to as “chain-link” strategies. This is when competitive advantages coming from several seemingly disparate functions “link” together to create a

MATI and Road Mapping

Much credit for the genesis of road mapping needs to be given to Motorola in work they did during the early 1990s. Together with Northwestern University, they created MATI (Management of Accelerated Technology Innovation), a consortium of private companies and academia focused only on road mapping. The issue the group confronted was the accelerating speed at which technologies were improving and the impact on product design. They needed a meaningful approach to forecast technologies. In essence, road mapping was a managerial response to Moore’s Law. The law states that computing density doubles every two years. The challenge was, and still is, that the trend is exponential; meaning that in high-tech industries, as soon as a company launched a product, a new and better product would be on its way from competitors.

The MATI group realized that if product line strategists wished to stay in leadership positions, they needed to advance their platforms and the requisite building blocks of technologies of their product lines in concert with advances of all technologies. For this reason, early road mapping concentrated only on technologies and just in high-tech industries. However, it did not take long for MATI members to recognize the obvious impact of matching technologies to products to customer needs within the roadmap. At the same time, they realized the roadmap must be reflective of competition and the dynamics of the market environment. These were major insights because they set up the planning and execution of product line strategy in any market--not just high-tech markets.


chain that is resistant to any competitor’s single-function strategy. (See figure 6.)

Consider, for example, Apple’s business strategy. We clearly see the wonder of its product line Strategies with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. However, at the same time, Apple exercises a streamlined supply chain strategy that both efficiently assembles product across China and locks out competitors from key supply and equipment sources.15 They also maintain a robust and aggressive intellectual property strategy, sell through masterfully attractive and successful retail stores across the world, and receive enormous support from their powerful “i-anything, i-am-cool” brand strategy. These strategies create a chain-link that, when coupled with the cost advantage of scale, presents a formidable barrier to entry for all potential competitors. Product line strategy, albeit enormously important, is just one of the links.

The significance of the chain-link union of product line strategy and business strategy cannot be overemphasized. By eliminating competitors from market participation, it greatly improves the odds of success for both

existing products and new offerings. While many organizations will use the notion of chain-link strategy to conjure up their own approach, many more will seek an understanding to figure out, in hindsight, how they were locked out of markets. This is why it is critical for business strategists and product line strategists to align their thinking and their actions.

Now, consider Samsung’s battle with Apple’s iPhone. Their Galaxy smartphone running on Google’s Android operating system delivers on a smart and competitive product line strategy. Head-to-head evaluations against Apple’s iPhone, Samsung often wins. Unfortunately, Apple’s intellectual property strategy is causing Samsung extreme headaches as legal proceedings block off entry into certain geographic markets. In today’s global marketplace, it is not common to win with just product line strategy alone. However, product line strategists must realize that it is also not common to win without a smart product line strategy. Certainly, Samsung cannot. The bottom line is that product line strategy, albeit insufficient to win in the market by itself, still matters greatly.

FIGURE 6: The Chain-Link Business Strategy. The business model defines the manner in which the links come together.

Business as a “Chain-Link” of Strategies

SourcingStrategy

Product LineStrategy

HRStrategy

Production / Platform Strategy

DistributionStrategy

FinanceStrategy


Strategizing the Advantage

Smart product line strategy requires intelligent insights. Yet the major inhibitors of these desired insights are the mental and often subconscious restrictions in which we tie up our thinking. The key to smart product line strategy is in gaining an ability to release our thoughts and enabling a flash of brilliance to be captured as an intelligent insight. Many in the field of new product development recognize the role of creativity in ideation and developing new concepts. However, there is an equally important application of creative thought in the planning and workout of brilliant product line strategies.

A good start to creating product line strategy is simply to think of it like putting a puzzle together. Finding and assembling the pieces of the puzzle will serve the diagnostic of the situation, the generation of a brilliant insight, and the formulation an executable course forward.

The main challenge in product line strategy formulation is that the pieces of the puzzle — the nuggets of knowledge and insider insights--can be assembled into a seemingly endless array of pictures. Furthermore, some pieces may be missing, some may be irrelevant, and others may be distorted. On top of that, there is no single result to the puzzle, nor are there deductive principles or algorithms to pump out the pieces into the picture of the singular smart strategy. Rather, an intelligent insight--the spark of genius behind the strategy--is what holds the picture together. Most often, only knowledgeable observers recognize its value to the underlying product line. This is why establishing a mechanism that focuses the organization to set up and induce a spark of genius is so valuable. That is what product line roadmapping is all about.

Product Line Roadmaps

The good news is that product line strategy does not need to be left to serendipity and happenstance. Product line strategists may use road mapping to drive creation or reinforcement of the product line strategy. The process enables a crossfunctional approach to collecting, discovering and creatively assembling the pieces of the product line strategy puzzle. Through assembly and disassembly, by arranging and rearranging, and with discovery of new pieces of the puzzle, the product line strategist greatly increases the likelihood of sparking the intelligent insights foundational to a product line strategy.

The process of strategizing16 and road mapping the product line is, at its root, a knowledge process. Knowingly or not, product managers will find themselves carrying out the process. Moreover, it is often done by themselves, without creative input from others. This is a problem. With the exception of the independent entrepreneur starting up a small business, I seldom see the case where all relevant knowledge related to markets, technologies, competitors, customers, trends, changes, value chains, organizational constraints, and product life cycles resides in one person’s brain.17 Even less frequently do I see the same person originate the intelligent insights and assemble the puzzle into a smart product line strategy and an executable roadmap.18 Rather, strategizing and road mapping a product line is a process requiring multiple inputs, analyses, and inductive reasoning from people with a wide breath of relevant knowledge. No doubt, road mapping should be conducted by deeply insightful participants.

There are two key outcomes of the road mapping process: a product line strategy, and a tactical roadmap of projects and programs for carrying out the strategy. The idea is that both work off each other. The strategy directs what and how the product line will advance. The roadmap is


the executable plan of projects and programs for making it happen. If the roadmap calls into question the reality of execution, then one must rethink the strategy. Or, if the roadmap strays from the direction of the strategy, then one may wish to re-craft the roadmap. No matter the case, the idea is to match the product line strategy to the business strategy and to build a product line roadmap of projects and programs that execute the product line strategy.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the combined strategy-road mapping process is that it sets up targets for innovation as part of, and specific to, the product line strategy. In other words, the process captures both what is in development and what should be in development at some point in time.

This is a thought-provoking advance because it adds innovation and creative thinking in a focused manner into the strategy of the product line. And while all product line strategists would hope for a positive outcome from the pursuit of projects that target specific innovations, the learning from each effort, no matter the outcome, will feed new and relevant pieces of knowledge to the further evolution of a smart product line strategy puzzle.

Roadmaps and Product Line Strategies

There are five components that can help product line strategists think through product line strategies and roadmaps:

• The product, • The product line, • The platform, • Market segments, and • Technology building blocks.

The simplest element, the product, may be either tangible or intangible, e.g., a service. Or, if desired, the product may couple both the tangible and intangible.

A product is also a bundle of technologies that exhibit through product attributes. If successful, the attributes serve to satisfy a set of customer needs or wants. The linkage from technologies to attributes to customer satisfaction as seen in Figure 7 is important to understand because, as we will see, it enables the basic construct of road mapping.

The product line, or product family as some call it, is the set of related products fulfilling customer needs in similar markets and segments. The purpose of the product line is to address different customer wants and needs with different products that have different attributes. Because product lines often emanate from the same or closely related platforms, product line strategists typically capture current and future plans and projects for all products within the product line onto a single product line roadmap.

For the product line strategist, the platform is the most powerful of the components. As I previously discussed, it enables the strategy by delivering a source of leverage. If successful, this leverage establishes a strategic advantage over competitors.Market segments provide the target at which the attributes of products should be aimed. Understanding the characteristics of segments

Market Segments

Customer Needs (Voice of the Customer)

Product Requirements (e.g., QFD, Conjoint)

Platforms

Technology Building Blocks

Technologies & Competencies

Products

FIGURE 7: Technologies to attributes to customer satisfaction relation to Platforms


and sub-segments in the context of trends, changes, and key influences is essential to product line road mapping and product line strategy. Obviously, fulfilling the needs of customers within a market is requisite to gaining the desired cash flow or reward of product line strategy success. However, the challenge is not only figuring out how to fulfill customer needs, but to do so vis-àvis competition, whose mission is to supplant your company in the same arena.

Technology building blocks, as the name implies, are additive to platforms. They complement platforms with the creation and delivery of attributes of the product which, in turn, match the needs of customers within a specific market segment. It is the technology building blocks, sometimes simple and at other times complex, which enable the leverage of platforms. Often the very essence of product line strategy is dependent upon the advancement of technology building blocks.

Road Mapping as a Process

The process of product line road mapping combines an information flow, a workflow (gathering and analyzing information) and, most importantly, a decision flow. It is the set of choices, judgments and key decisions regarding projects and programs that define where the product line is going. It lays out a plan, specific to an intended product line strategy, for driving innovation and aligning all product development work and the management of products already in the market. It is a timeline of purposeful activities, projects and programs.

Road mapping is a key link between product line strategy and project management. A product line roadmap will spell out the programs, projects and events that should occur for the strategy to be carried out and objectives to be met. Ongoing execution of these programs, projects and events

FIGURE 8: Roadmap connecting technology building blocks to platforms to market segments and customer needs. PIMs are products in the market. PIDs are products in development. PICs are Product Innovation Charters,

also known as products in concept.


would then be monitored and managed through process management and product portfolio management. By the very nature of the roadmap, the project set need also be inclusive of searching for innovations or discoveries, which may become development projects. Road mapping does this by generating targets for innovations, whereas front-end concept generation practices use such targets as the focal point of work to create the innovation itself.

Once organizations complete product line roadmaps, they can use them in communications with the entire value chain, including suppliers, resellers and customers. Some communications may be with abridged versions of the roadmaps. Other communications may be conducted under strict nondisclosure agreements. On the supplier side, a roadmap tells the firm what offerings they need to create and by when, and what technologies they need to embrace. There is no greater frustration to a product line strategist than to realize that a constraint on a new development resides with a supplier or another link in the business strategy, not within their own domain of control.

On the customer side, communications can assure customers that certain attributes or offerings are in the wings and there is no need to purchase a competitive alternative. For customers who have an interest in a platform, this can be helpful and valuable news. During the 1990s, we saw the roadmap also become a sales force weapon in the war of competitive selling. It did not matter if the launch of a certain offering came to fruition. Rather, what mattered in the short run was whether you held off the customer from purchasing a competitive offering. Such statements of delivery and subsequent lack of delivery became known as “vaporware.” The use of roadmaps for customers and suppliers grew in importance significantly as computer and software technology came of age in the 1990s. This was exemplified by a classroom exchange I had during 2001 while delivering a workshop on product line road mapping in San Jose, California.

Communicating Roadmaps

One of the attendees was a director of engineering from Intel. At the time, the Wintel partnership platform (Microsoft’s windows running on Intel’s x86 CPU) was at its peak. Every supplier, every reseller, and every customer wanted to know the nuances of advancements to the Wintel platform. The earlier suppliers and resellers knew about changes, the more likely and the sooner they could take advantage of them. And for customers, the more they knew about what was to be delivered, the less likely they were to purchase other software or computing platforms.

During the workshop, the Intel engineering director started to laugh as I discussed the notion of using roadmaps across the value chain. After he explained why, everyone else in the class laughed too. It turned out that at the time, engineers within Intel were not as close to the details of their roadmaps as outsiders might have expected. Yes, they did know the roadmap, at a certain level anyway. Their better source for understanding the Wintel roadmap, the engineering director pointed out, was from a public website called something like “Dan’s Roadmaps.” Here, Dan had collected and offered up all roadmaps that had been shared with customers or the media from all players in the Wintel arena.

If you really wanted to know the details of the Wintel platform and its building blocks, Dan’s Roadmaps was your best source. If you were an engineer at Intel and wanted to know what projects might be coming through the pipe, you might want to check out the Dan’s website. I must admit this insight pulled me back to reality in my understanding of the challenge of people-to-people communications about roadmaps in large companies dealing with complex and dynamic issues.


The Wintel example shines light on the need for both top-down and bottom-up thinking in order to create and execute a meaningful product line roadmap. The devil is in the details and the details are in the nitty-gritty of product design, engineering and marketing. Nonetheless, these details need to align with the strategic direction given through a top-down mechanism. That is why I offer up strategizing and road mapping within a single process. It enables the creation and alignment of one with the other, not one based on the other.

Strategies and Roadmaps

The link between product line strategies and roadmaps is critical. Each is instrumental in defining the other. To learn more, please visit our website (http://adept-plm.com) and join us for one of our workshops on the topic (http://adept-plm.com/ppm-workshops/).

We can also provide customeized workshops and consulting. Please call (904) 551-0673 or email [email protected] for more information.

About the Author

Paul O’Connor is a past-president of the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA). He is a contributing author to the Journal of Product Innovation Management, the first and second editions of The PDMA Handbook of Product Development and The PDMA Toolbook of Product Development. Paul is also a past contributing editor to R&D Magazine. His SpiralUpTM Capability Transformation model is widely recognized and used around the world. Paul teaches Master Courses on New Product Development (NPD) portfolio management, product line and technology road mapping, and NPD risk assessment and forecasting.

Paul has worked with clients around the world on improving product development performance. In his more than 25 years of consulting in new product development, he has guided the efforts of numerous companies in consumer packaged goods, the chemical industry, the automotive industry, building products, insurance and banking, and high-tech software and hardware to name a few. Paul also worked with SAP to help guide their product planning directed at the NPD market.

Paul is managing director and principal shareholder of The Adept Group Limited, Inc. He received a Master of Business Administration from Babson College and holds a Bachelor of Engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology. He is also a Certified New Product Development Professional (NPDP) and contributed to shaping the first tests for receiving such professional certification.

http://adept-plm.com

http://adept-plm.com/ppm-workshops/

http://adept-plm.com/ppm-workshops/

mailto:info@adept-plm


Footnotes1 James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones. Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation. 2003.2 Throughout this whitepaper I reference client engagements and personal knowledge accrued over many years. On

purpose, several engagements are over 10 years old, enabling me to reveal information that may have been covered under non-disclosure agreement terms. Newer engagements are purposely disguised to avoid revealing confidential information.

3 The four -ever model of strategic advantage is difficult to track back in history. Three of the components price, speed and quality are cited in much of the quality movement literature of the 1970s and ‘80s. Clearly though, in product development, specific attribute performance is tightly related to perception of quality. Similarly, for product line of multiple products, we see the characteristic of variety of the full offering or customization of the offerings also contributing an important point of advantage in the market.

4 There is an exception though, albeit temporary. If managers want to escape the constraints of the advantage trade-off, they will need to shift the context of the market and competition, while building new platforms. Currently referred to as “Blue Ocean Strategy”, the desired end result is to create whole new markets void of competition and replace current offerings based on totally new platforms. As expected, however, maintaining the four-advantage lead gained from this approach will eventually be challenged by competitors. Once competition enters the market, continuing the four-advantage leverage will prove difficult for the simple reason that competitors will attack the new market with a niche approach, using single- and double-advantage levers.

5 I articulate the concept of inertia and entropy related to portfolio management in a 2011 Whitepaper “Overcoming Portfolio Inertia and Portfolio Entropy.”

6 In studies on how we think, referred to as Theory of Mind, the manner in which people think through social relationships is laid out in levels of intention. For strategy, we often see complexity reach the 4th, 5th and 6th levels. The 1st level of intention is to think “I want a cookie”. The 2nd level is to think “she wants a cookie”. A 3rd level is “I know that she knows that I want a cookie”. In product strategy this is made ever more complex by the fact that instead of a cookie, managers will need to address an array of technologies, customer behaviors, organizational capabilities, and competitive actions.

7 This title is a tip of the hat to Prof .Rummelt of UCLA for his book, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. If you are seriousabout the topic of strategy, this is a must read.

8 I suspect that there are and will be other archetypes. The combination of global business and accelerated innovation creates enormous potential of economic values for new platform types or models. Somebody somewhere will figure it out, if they havenít already.

9 Marc Meyer and Alvin Lehnerd. The Power of Product Platforms. First edition, 1997; second edition, 2011.10 Mark Wagner and Guy Norris. Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Nov. 12, 2009.11 Michael E. McGrath. Product Strategy for High Technology Companies. 2000.12 Carly Fiorina left Lucent to become president and eventually CEO of Hewlett Packard, where she gained a

reputation for screwing things up.13 W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make

Competition Irrelevant. 2005.14 Arthur Thompson, Margaret Peteraf, A. J. Strickland III and John Gamble. Crafting & Executing Strategy:

Concepts and Readings. 2011.15 Adam Satariano and Peter Burrows. “Apple’s Supply-Chain Secret? Hoard Lasers”. Bloomberg Business Week. Nov. 3, 2011.16 I personally dislike the word “strategizing”, but have elected to use it to simply “verbify” the noun so as to

capture what is being advocated: the actions of creating strategy. Several dictionaries do, in fact, recognize “strategize” as a word.

17 Often the stories of such individuals take on an almost folklore like tenor. Consider Edwin Land of Polaroid, Steve Jobs of Apple and Charles Swartz of Starbucks. No doubt each was a great contributor to their organization’s success. But each also had many individuals contributing to the collection, analysis and judgment of insights needed to create and grow their businesses.

18 As Griffin, Price and Vojak point out in their excellent book Serial Innovators: How Individuals Create And Deliver Breakthrough Innovations In Mature Firms, even strong contributors must work with others to achieve desired innovations. 2012.

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About The Adept GroupWhat We Do: The Adept Group focuses on new product development (NPD) productivity and innovation management productivity. We work with clients across each level of capability to advance processes, systems, skills, methods, practices and cultural influences.

How We Do It: We use three powerful platforms to deliver our in-depth, world-class competencies in all aspects of product development and innovation management. These platforms are 1) Facilitative Consulting, 2) Knowledge Sharing, and 3) Software and Enablers.

Facilitative Consulting: NPD and Innovation Management ServicesOur facilitative consulting services address all aspects of improving an organization’s capability and productivity of NPD and innovation management. We work hand-in-hand with clients, not apart from clients. Because all of The Adept Group services are customized to match each client’s needs and uniqueness, the offerings listed here serve as guidelines for discussion and scoping:

• NPD Capability Maturity Assessments – Paths to Improvement• NPD Information Systems Assessment, Selection, Blueprints, and Process Design• NPD Process Implementation: Sub-processes and Full Architecture• Stage-Gate Redesign and Streamlining: Decision Flow & Work Flow Optimization• Rapid NPD Portfolio Analysis: Data Quality and Analytics• NPD RiskAssessor™ Team Reviews: Critical In-depth Project Analysis• Product Line Strategizing and Road Mapping – Targets for Innovation

Knowledge Sharing: Best-in-Class Workshops & TrainingWe offer an expert knowledge sharing platform with a variety of workshops, workouts, and summits. Join us for a scheduled workshop or we can create a customized engagement for your company – be it a workshop, workout or Summit. Workshop topics include:

• Product Line Strategizing and Road Mapping• NPD Forecasting and Risk Assessment• Portfolio, Pipeline, and Platform Management• Front-To-End NPD Architecture• Outsourced: VOC and PM for NPD• Portfolio Analytics• Leveraging SAP Infrastructure for Increased PD Productivity• Flexible Product Development• How to Capture Customer Requirements and Develop Project Scope• Project and Program Management Basics for New Product Development• Understanding New Product Development and Innovation Management• Using Social Media in New Product Development Software & Enablers:Our software solutions extend the learnings of our facilitative consulting and workshops to your desk and come with professional support to ensure your continued success for disciplined management of your NPD portfolios and projects, while helping you progress towards your desired growth and innovation. Software solutions include:

• PortViewTM - The easy-to-use chart maker and analysis tool for NPD Portfolios.• RiskAssessorTM - The powerful tool to help you in assessing and quantifying NPD project risks.• RoadMapping RampUpTM - The online tool for initiating and supporting product line road mapping

and developing smart product line strategies.For more information:

(904) [email protected]

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Strategizing, Roadmapping and Executing the Product Lineadept-plm.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Adept-Whitepaper_2013.pdf · and methods such as QFD or conjoint analysis to ... as