rebuilding a mature product portfolio

mid-size public products and services company 

Challenge:  How does a large, publicly traded company facing a declining market for its core products revitalize its product line to reflect the changing needs of its customers?
 
methodology:

Building from an assessment of the current portfolio, our work helped leaders change the product organization, products, and strategic operating plans to uncover new and profitable growth. We:

• Created a model for assessing the current product portfolio.  Product managers were led through a process to evaluate every product in the portfolio, determining which products to grow, hold, harvest, execute and jump-start through acquisition.
• Designed and documented a new process for innovation to move ideas into pilot and then full implementation with less time and cost in development. Aveus successfully completed several pilot tests and moved the concepts into implementation.
• Seated a senior consultant inside the organization to manage the product team and portfolio for most of a year while key leadership hires were made.
• Created new lean development cross-functional teams responsible for the key growth of product portfolios.
• Coached a new Chief Marketing Officer throughout the transformation.

benefits realized:

The company gained a clear view of the strengths and gaps in their current products and services portfolio, then executed a realignment of the portfolio to trim and expand in a way that better matched customer needs.  Skills and capabilities in the product marketing organization were dramatically upgraded.  A framework for two years of strategic and operational planning ensured sustainability of the change.

Using the framework, the company made several successful acquisitions, and portfolio performance has improved.

what questions should you be thinking about?

Contact Aveus Partner, Linda Ireland. You can reach her at ireland@aveus.com.