Gorka Santamaria · Independent product advisor
Make your products fit their market
Independent product advisory
A boutique practice helping leadership teams navigate important product decisions
Why bring an external product perspective?
Companies know their product portfolio intimately: they know how products work, but also why they became the way they are.
Products gradually absorb the decisions made around them. Some began with the needs of an early customer, while others reflect the conditions of a particular market. Pricing may still follow the logic of a previous generation. There was a reason for every choice, even if that reason is no longer easy to see in the product today.
From inside the company, it can become difficult to separate what still makes sense from what has simply become familiar.
An independent review introduces some distance.
It looks across the product and the commercial system around it, without beginning from a preferred framework or a predetermined sequence of work.
A wider commercial perspective, with the product at its centre.
Every product reaches a decision moment
Product Direction
Bringing clarity to positioning, portfolio and priorities
Several futures may appear credible for the same product. It could move towards another customer group, become more software-driven or grow into a broader system around what was originally a focused offer.
Each direction may look attractive on its own. The more difficult question is what it would gradually turn the product and the business behind it into.
Every decision has a starting point
Snapshot
An independent review methodology
Product questions tend to grow quickly. A concern becomes a workshop, the workshop becomes a programme and, before long, the process has acquired a life of its own.
A Snapshot examines the product and the commercial logic that has formed around it. It considers where the value comes from, how the offer is positioned and priced, what influences adoption and which assumptions are quietly shaping what happens next.
Product Snapshot
A close examination of one product, the market around it and the decisions that have brought it to its current position.
Portfolio Snapshot
A review of how several products coexist, the roles they play and the complexity and investment choices that have accumulated between them.
Every product carries the history of the decisions that shaped it.
My career has taken me through international technology and engineering businesses where products were expected to succeed across different markets, industries and stages of growth.
The technologies changed. The organisations changed. The product questions were always similar.
Over time, I became less interested in individual products than in the thinking behind the decisions that shaped them.
The value of an external perspective is not that it sees more, but that it sees differently.