Most business people attribute the success of a product to its features and design, treating it as an isolated 'thing', separate from the company that provides it.
However, a successful product is not merely a thing. Instead, it is an integrated customer experience that combines operations, delivery, sales, and community seamlessly.
Just think, you can buy a coffee from anywhere, yet the café you love delivers an experience that keeps you coming back.
Successful companies organise their business around their customers and products, i.e. they are structured to maximise consumer and shareholder value generation. The structure creates an engine that integrates the product with business operations, marketing and sales functions.
Although it may seem obvious, building a delivery engine is often overlooked when creating new products or prospecting for new clients. Instead of creating a robust and customer-centric business model, many firms lose themselves in pursuing groundbreaking ideas or novel clients. The result is a disconnect between the core business structure and the new venture, leading to an unsuccessful execution more often than not.
Consider a company that typically sells high-consideration, complex services to large corporations. If such a company decides to venture into high-volume, low-consideration services, the chances of failure are substantial. Their established processes, geared towards complexity and thoroughness, would likely smother the new venture in bureaucratic procedures and delay.
On the other side of the spectrum, imagine a small-scale enterprise attempting to serve the needs of large corporations. Their existing structure, not scaled to meet such demands, would inevitably need help to deliver the complex governance expected. The problem goes beyond legal complexity extending into processes like sales compensation, order handling, and support - all vital to commercial execution.
So, what's a product leader to do? Firstly assess whether your business structure aligns with the requirements of a new product or prospect. This evaluation should be an integral part of the product ideation process. If the answer is negative, it warrants a reassessment of the idea itself. Does it still hold water, considering the risks of failed execution? If not, can the product be isolated from the core business, allowing specific working methods to enable a successful execution?
Bringing new products to market successfully requires more than excellent engineering and marketing. It demands a thorough consideration of your company's structure and capability to adapt and cater to your product's and target customer's needs. In essence, the key to successful product commercialisation lies not in the product build but in how you go to market and deliver a customer experience.