Technology Product Strategy & Roadmap Development for a Major Technology Company

ENGAGEMENT

A major technology client sought to refresh its product strategy with new products and services, product enhancements and new lines of business. The organization desired support collaboratively designing a new enterprise-wide product strategy methodology, executing the strategy development process and operationalizing  the new capability. DayBlink Consulting  led workshops across the enterprise, conducted market research and assessed and prioritized product opportunities. Results included a renewed enterprise product strategy, a 3-year product roadmap and a new repeatable product development methodology supported by detailed operational runbooks.

PROBLEM

Despite the climate of growing competition from incumbent providers and increasing cord cutters, there had been minimal innovation across the company’s broader product strategy and there were insufficient mechanisms in place to define an appropriate future enterprise-wide product strategy.

Numerous challenges existed.  Product strategy was developed in silos across the business.  50+ product ideas were on various product development backlogs across the company. There was no mechanism to consistently evaluate product ideas.  The strategy was primarily focused on enhancing existing products, rather than developing new products and services.  There were several recently acquired lines of business that had not previously worked together.  And cross-functional leaders could not reach a consensus on what new products to add to the product roadmap.

SOLUTION

DayBlink Consulting established an enterprise-wide product strategy development capability and led the client’s teams through the process to produce a refreshed product strategy. We collaborated with key stakeholders to define an overall design of the development methodology. A rebuilt intake process would proactively ingest product ideas, avoiding the buildup of a large and overlooked backlog of potentially promising opportunities. The new evaluation framework included: opportunity definition, qualitative analyses and quantitative analyses. The evaluation framework outputs would feed into a series of workshops and ultimately produce a refreshed enterprise-level strategic product vision and supporting multi-year strategic product roadmap.

Once the overall design was ready, we guided the organization as teams moved through the new method. DayBlink Consulting was responsible for leading senior executives through executive visioning workshops where leaders aligned on key north star goals and metrics, guiding principles and the product opportunities for evaluation.

We then collaborated with product teams across the company to define product profiles and potential business models. In the following qualitative analyses, marketing brought in-depth market research – assessing the market opportunity, benchmarking, conducting competitive analyses, rationalizing business models, etc. The next phase of analysis heavily involved engineering and finance teams. DayBlink Consulting led engineering teams through technical assessment and feasibility workshops to assess level of effort. The Finance teams developed financial models to forecast the financial opportunity across the various product opportunities.

Once all product evaluations were complete, we developed an initial roadmap which prioritized the opportunities across a timeline. Through a series of reviews with leadership, we collectively agreed on overarching product strategy themes emerged and established a roadmap. Leading the organization through the new product strategy development process required extensive program planning and execution. We designed and facilitated program kickoff and key workshops with executives and cross-functional teams. We managed ongoing program steering and operational sessions and maintained other regular reporting mechanisms to resolve issues or roadblocks and continuously align all stakeholders throughout the program.

We also developed evaluation tools and materials that the various teams used to perform their evaluations and analysis. DayBlink Consulting iterated with key stakeholders to design and finalize scoring criteria and weighting design. Our templates guided teams through the analysis and ensured product opportunities were evaluated in a consistent manner. Consistency was key to ensuring product opportunities could be comparatively assessed and prioritized.

RESULT

The client established a refreshed 3-year product strategy roadmap and a new standardized and repeatable enterprise-wide product strategy development capability. We rationalized 50+ product ideas and 100+ business models, prioritized and sequenced select product ideas into a roadmap, and forecasted financial returns over the next 5 years. 

The leaders aligned to a common framework for consistent evaluation of product ideas. We created a forum for introducing new product ideas across the company in a formal manner and provided standardized evaluation tool templates and workshops to facilitate consistent and efficient evaluations. Finally, we set-up an operational playbook and a capability improvements backlog for the client to use while evolving its product strategy.