ENGAGEMENT
The Product Organization of a large telecommunications company wanted to refresh its product strategy with new revenue-producing product features, services, and lines of business.
PROBLEM
Despite the climate of growing competition from incumbent providers and increasing cord cutters, there was minimal recent innovation across the company’s broader product strategy and there were insufficient mechanisms in place to define an 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. Their 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 was engaged to develop an enterprise-wide product strategy development capability and lead the client’s teams through the process to produce a refreshed product strategy. We collaborated with key stakeholders to develop an intake process, evaluation framework, engagement model and a prioritization and sequencing methodology. Once the overall design was ready, we were responsible for leading cross-functional teams across marketing, finance, engineering, legal, product and the multiple business lines through executive visioning workshops, model rationalization, market research & sizing, technical assessments, financial analyses, and prioritization and alignment readouts. To facilitate this process, DayBlink Consulting prepared and orchestrated the program kickoff, program tracking and reporting, evaluation metrics definition, visioning and assessment workshop design and facilitation, and product evaluation workbook templates.
RESULT
The client deployed our 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.