Why Boards should ask their CPOs to triage their product portfolios.
by Leica Ison
Why Boards should, as a priority, ask their Chief Product Officer to do an immediate review of product costs and triage their product portfolios. A triage places your products into profitability, growth outlook and risk profile - a product health-check.
In my series of short solves in under 10 minutes, I explore a simple and robust way to look at cash flow, product costs and why every product leader - even if your business is growing - has now an immediate need to review and triage your product portfolios to be ready to grow.
Why? Well, because your old assumptions about your market, customer buying behaviours, the share of customer wallet have probably now changed.
Product costs are likely to have been impacted by supply chain disruptions leading to increased delivery timeframes and increased freight costs as demand exceeds supply. This COVID-19 impact means changed assumptions around product inventory and stock levels, translating into cash flow impacts.
The essential short-term action for directors is to ask their Chief Product Officer to review, revalidate and audit the organisation's product portfolios. Re-evaluate market trends and if the market is still there in the medium term and how you can 'cost-up' your product portfolios for the new market factors in the 'new normal'.
Boards should typically ask CPO to review product portfolios and determine how they can seek to cleverly extract 20%- 30% in product cost efficiencies by exploring better user flows, adopting new technology and sunsetting products that are disproportionately consuming operational costs.
If you triage your product portfolios, you can more easily see where to invest for medium-term sustainability. Right now, a product with good cash flow needs to be prioritised - but so too for the medium term, your product team should be doing deep dive health-check on products and developing focused 90-day product plans that align with a new business strategy - cash flow, product profitability and high conviction growth.
Watch out this week for our Guide:: A better way to forecast and triage your product portfolios for the next 90 days. I'm grateful to have along Raphael to co-author the Guide with me. Raphael has 20 years of commercial strategy experience gained in strategy and corporate development roles in companies across the Energy Efficiency, IoT, Telecommunications and IT markets both domestically and internationally- and we will combine our collective product insights to explore a thing or two about finding flex in your product commercial assumptions, a better way to do product forecasts and audit an existing product portfolio and budgets.
You can also join me at our Webinar on Thursday where I deep dive into how agile product teams can use predictive modelling to set multi-year product forecasts and some tips for prioritizing opportunities and risk using Ai based product health-checks. Register here Predictive modelling for agile product teams.