Product Portfolio Rebalancing Yields Growth

Situation:

A $2 billion company brought us in to help identify the reasons why their last three major product introductions failed when current customers rejected the products and new customers failed to materialize. As a result, the company failed to meet its growth targets, and the share price underperformed by 20% as compared to its competitors.

Actions:

We conducted a series of interviews with board members, the executive leadership team, key members of the R & D organization and customers to identify the critical issues in the way of their success. Then we facilitated the executive team through the process of identifying the technical and market risk they had undertaken with their current strategy, and developing a new strategic plan that would have a much greater likelihood of success. We also gave the company proprietary decision-making tools for evaluating new product concepts against this strategy, developed technology roadmaps to reduce the amount of technical risk in their products, and coached them through the process of deepening relationships with their major customers to reduce the amount of market risk.

Results:

Company leaders killed off several projects that were headed for failure and reinvested those resources into new products that they will develop collaboratively with their major customers. They accelerated launch dates on excellent products that were nearly finished but lacked the resources to get over the finish line. In less than a year, the company's stock price began to recover as the market learns about the new products to be released this year.