Nailing the Jelly to the Wall
Managing Turnkey and Custom Products
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Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
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“Product management won’t work at my business. Everything we do is customized.”
This is a common reply when I talk about having a good product strategy, which means aligning your products to what customers want and to your company’s goals, while also keeping an eye on how your solution portfolio performs so it stays relevant in the market. Because I work in product management, and this seems obvious to me, but like others, I may skip the intellectual step of helping them understand what a product is. Many think of a product as a physical item made in large numbers. This may be one of the biggest misunderstandings a product management consultant faces.
Therefore, let’s start by defining a product. A product is an object, tool, or service that meets a need and is valued by a customer. A product may or may not be a tangible object, and it might not be the same for each customer. Restaurants, hair salons, and your local mechanic all sell products, but every meal, haircut, or car repair can be different. Beef, chicken, or barbacoa? On-road or off-road tires? Mokawk or dreadlocks? OEM or generic parts? You get to choose. Does this mean your Subway sandwich is not a product? Absolutely not! My mechanic has a range of services, certified mechanics, and a logistics system full of parts they can pull from to solve the problem I came to them with.
Several years ago, I established and led product management for a leading fine art logistics and storage company. Since art, by definition, is not standardized, neither were our products. No one has figured out how to get an artist to standardize the size, shape, weight, and composition of a work of art, and every art collector has their own idea of how they want to display their art. This meant that whether we were storing the art, transporting it, or hanging it on a client’s wall, every job we did was of necessity customized.
So what was I, a product manager, doing in that business? How was I supposed to create a portfolio of products to sell? The answer is simple: I was solving our customers’ problems not with a final finished product, but with a portfolio of solutions our teams could draw from to build that customized solution. This made building each new job more efficient and, important when working with priceless art, safe, secure, and repeatable.
Just as Subway has a counter filled with the ingredients you need to make the sandwich of your dreams, a business with customizable solutions must have a portfolio of ready tools, services, and capabilities to put together the solution the customer is looking for. In fine art logistics, we had crating and different types of storage to protect the art, specialized trucks to get it where it needs to go, insurance and disaster response services for when things went wrong, and most importantly, we had some of the most highly trained specialists in the business who know how to put these solutions together and create the solutions our clients were looking for.
It is crucial not to have to wait to decide what tools, materials, and capabilities we need to assemble when the customer calls. Just like your favorite sandwich shop, the product manager must understand the customer and their needs, often better than the customer themselves, and then create a portfolio of “modular” solutions ready for our experts to build the right solution based on the needs of the customer. This ensures that we can quickly deliver what the customer needs without building everything from scratch, saving often days or weeks and thousands in costs while also using tried and tested items, methods, and equipment to ensure it is done right every time. Modularity brings efficiency and effectiveness not only in physical products, but in services as well.
Another key role a product manager plays is to ensure their portfolios of solutions are performing well and are relevant to the current market. Product managers need to constantly evaluate the portfolio to identify and fill solution gaps while trimming solutions that may no longer be relevant or that can be more easily outsourced. Then they must ensure that sales, marketing, and operations are well-versed in the solutions, the value they provide, and how to use each of them to provide full-scope solutions to the customer’s problems. This way, when the customer comes to us with a problem, we can walk to our literal or figurative shelf of solutions and build just what they need.
Whether you are a business with a concrete set of ready products you pull from a shelf and ship or a turnkey business that builds a custom solution for each customer, understanding who you are, what you do well, and what your customers need from you is crucial to your business. Moving from a transactional vendor to a partner your customers come to again and again for solutions requires a well-thought-out and executed product strategy.
Customer-Led Innovations Consulting (CLIC) helps you build that strategy. Whether you need a part-time product manager or someone to help you build your own program, we are here to help get things CLIC-ing. CLIC on the link above for a free consultation and see how we might be able to help build a program that is adapted to what you do best and focused on those that keep you in business - your customers.
