Episode C.003 Product Leadership or Quality

The company value proposition or value discipline is how it provides superior value to gain competitive advantage. It provides a framework that segments the market into three value disciplines

• operational excellence or price
• product leadership or quality
• customer intimate or service

Product Leadership or Quality
The consistent striving to provide your customers with leading-edge products/services or useful new applications of existing products or services. In order to do so, they must be creative, agile and fast.

Their strength lies in reacting to situations as they occur. Consequently, product leaders avoid bureaucracy at all costs because it slows down the commercialization of their ideas. The operating model of a product leader is completely different from an operational excellent company and includes:
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• A focus on the core processes of invention, product development and market exploitation.
• An organizational structure that is loosely knit, ad hoc and ever changing to adjust to the entrepreneurial initiatives and redirections that characterize working in unexplored territory.
• A management system that is results-driven, measures and rewards new product success and that doesn’t punish the experimentation needed to get there.
• A culture that encourages individual imagination, accomplishment, out-of-the-box thinking, and a mindset driven by the desire to create the future.

Examples of product leaders are Apple, Nike, Rolex, Microsoft and Harley-Davidson.

What does the value discipline of Product Leadership look like?
Functional Emphasis

• R&D, Legal (licenses), Engineering

Process Emphasis

• Product development, Concept2Customer speed

Information Emphasis

• Linkages, communications, collaboration platform

Key Metrics

• Management of ideas thru funnel, patents

Key Concerns

• Future trends, portfolio of products (and services), ideas, risks

Organization, jobs, skills

• Ad hoc, organic team groupings, high skills abound within loose structure

Culture, Values, Norms

• Conceptual, future driven, experimentation, out of the box thinking

Information & Systems

• Person2person communication process, technologies enables collaboration

Management Systems

• Rewarding innovation, management of risk and exposure