Product Line Strategy
What is it and how do you create good strategies?
A product line strategy is a coherent approach to advance a product line. There are good strategies, poor strategies, and many in between. This definition shares foundational thinking about good strategies.
Good Strategy
A good product line strategy guides managers to improve their product line’s total performance. It creates a focus on the whole line, not just products independent of one another. And the focus also sets a course to avoid disjointed decisions, actions, and investments that may impact the line’s performance negatively.
Good strategies help companies to manage many challenges across three interrelated concerns: product creation, organizational alignment, and in-market management.
Product Line Goals
The goal of all product line strategies is to improve customer satisfaction, increase income, and fend off competitors. And it’s to do this across the full product line both in the near term and over the long run.
A Good Product Line Strategy will guide managers to match bundles of technologies with bundles of customer needs and do it repeatedly.
Forming Product Line Strategy
To form a product line strategy, managers must think through and explore possibilities and opportunities, and assess risks and threats. The job demands deep insights and foresight about the product line, customers, and competitors. And it calls for more than the common single-product mindset found in many companies.
Strategists must see the product line as a system of parts and forces. And they must have the foresight to see how change will play out. The change may include deliberate strategy moves such as new products, multi-generational advancements, pivots, and complete transformations.
Product Line Strategy Execution
But a strategy without great execution is meaningless. So you’ll see a good strategy also set up the means to carry it out. And that mechanism must aid teams in their response to change, whether a significant disruption or a minor hiccup. It does this by tying to Responsive Roadmapping, a continuous process that helps teams carry out strategy successfully.
More on Product Lines
Here are some resources to better understand Product Lines and their management.
- Responsive Roadmapping: A proactive approach to manage a Product Line system
- Product Line System Parts: See a more complete discussion
- Multi-Generational Product Plan (MGPP) Vs. Product Line Strategy and Roadmap
- Trapped in a Single Product Mindset
- Other Sources
