How to Screw Up a Product Line

When I began my career in product development a few decades ago, I simply did not understand how easy it is to screw up a product line.  In fact, I was quite envious of those accomplished managers who were overseeing established product lines.  It seemed to me that managing established lines didn’t cause people to lose much sleep worrying about how to develop and launch new stuff.  All they needed to do was manage pricing and promotion and then push on a sales force. 

Now, with much study and experience that accumulated into humility, I can say that I was totally naive.  Actually, even when I understood that managing an established product line was not all that easy, I still did not recognize what was needed to keep product lines or their businesses successful. But at least I could tell that it was a difficult task.  Plus, most all of us deeply involved in product innovation back in the day did indeed recognize that every product would eventually die, and it was very important to get organizations to embrace new offerings.

Yes, I do have consulting roots that took me into some of the “greatest innovators” of the time.  I worked with firms like Kodak, Bausch & Lomb, Polaroid, Motorola and the old Bell Labs that became Lucent.  And I bring this up because even though they failed, they were at the time recognized as great innovators. It was a badge of honor as a product development consultant to work with such innovative companies.  Almost every conference on product development and innovation used to have at least one speaker from one of the companies.  Of course, that’s what drew attendees.  We had to hear how the “best-in-class” did it.  Little did we know that these best would soon fail.  From a big picture perspective, we simply were not as smart as we thought.

Are We Really Better Today?

Flash forward to today and I hear much of the same.  But now we are told that there are new, modern, and better practices.  Apparently, the upstart consultants of today know exactly the mechanism to keep growth going.  Open, disruptive, start-up, lean, and intrapreneurial approaches are being preached as the way to create, grow and manage product lines.  The problem for me is that I remember how each of the firms mentioned had new ventures and skunk works underway.  They had intrapreneurial movements that ultimately failed.  And they had many innovations moving forward.  The problem was that all of the practices, methods, and approaches that we knew of at the time, were simply not sufficient.  Getting out of their product line quagmires with innovation was a nearly impossible mission.

Kodak is a great example. This company employed some very smart and innovative people.  Take a look at their foray into diagnostic blood testing.  They developed diagnostic blood chemistry that they placed on 35 MM slides.  The chemistry reagents embedded on slides were different for each diagnostic blood test to be conducted.  It was creativity and ingenuity at its best.  While Kodak ended up selling the business to J&J Diagnostics (another of my clients) for about $1 billion, the whole venture was not sufficient to offset all the bad stuff happening to Kodak’s core film product lines.  In retrospect, you’d probably find that Kodak did a lot of the things you’d hope they would have done, even in the digital space.  The problem was that they were perhaps a decade too late with these activities.  It was not for lack of methods approaches that they failed.  It was because they were too late. 

And that’s the problem here.  The most important aspect of strategy shifts that companies need to embrace is not a method, approach or guru-touted secret sauce.  It’s the timing.  The post-mortem on almost all failed product lines and companies would reveal statements akin to “we were bloody smart and knew what to do; we were simply too late.”  For the most part, the first reactive response to market and industry challenges is to tighten up the ship using stronger lean practices.  This makes sense because the first intonation of shareholders is to demand the maintenance of earnings, not the growth of revenue.  Unfortunately, such lean methods are the very approaches that create an inertia that holds back the needed product line and business transformations.  If only they had started earlier, before creating the “lean-interia.”   The timing mattered.  This, then, sets up a key question for all companies: How does a company become capable of making strong, strategically meaningful, and timely product line moves, with innovation or otherwise?

Proactive Product Lines

In many ways, this is a leadership and governance problem.  Ultimately it’s the leader’s face that will be displayed on the cover of Fortune or Forbes Magazine when things fail. And the article will likely call out members of the board of directors.  But that is a bit like saying that it’s the manager’s fault when an NFL team has a losing season.  The players certainly have a responsibility as well.

So here is my advice to the many players and leaders out there. Be proactive.  Be very proactive.  And in so much as your organization is reactive to customers, markets, technologies, and industry change, triple up on your proactive nature.  Do it at the product line level, the business unit level and at the corporate level.  And recognize that proactive strategy moves should happen before feeling the pain that induces reactive moves.  This requires an urgency before the emergency.  It is a demand on organizational behavior and leadership to gain greater offense in product line strategies. 

Because good proactive strategy moves within one product line may not be sufficient to offset notable technology, industry or economy shifts, the game must be played at the business unit and corporate level.  New products, new platforms, new markets, radical innovations and new ventures must all contribute to a proactive orientation.  This requires a roll-up of proactive product line strategies and roadmaps along with ventures and seed investments. The creation and ongoing work toward improving a business growth portfolio matter much more than the optimization of lean-driven project portfolios.   

Go Ahead, Screw it Up

Want to screw up a product line?  It’s easy. Simply remain reactive. The accumulation of reactive responses inevitably becomes too late to matter.  Want to embrace proactive product line strategy moves? That’s harder but doable. First, build an organizational understanding of product line strategies and their roll up into a full business growth portfolio. Then implement this understanding across product lines, business units, and the corporation.

I highly recommend learning more about this topic. Consider checking out the whitepaper on Product Line Strategies and Roadmaps and the on-demand webinar addressing the very Essence of Product Line Strategies.