Gorka Santamaria · Independent product advisor
Product Direction
Bringing clarity to positioning, portfolio and priorities
Products rarely lose direction in a single decision
It usually happens through perfectly reasonable ones.
A customer asks for something. A new market opens. A competitor moves. Technology makes something possible that was not possible before.
Over time, the product begins to carry all of them.
The question is no longer which decision made sense, but whether they still make sense together.
My approach
I begin by reading the product as a complete commercial system: the user, the proposition, the product itself, pricing, business model, channels, adoption and its role within the wider portfolio.
I then look for the tensions between those elements. Where, for example, a premium proposition meets a transactional sales channel, or a software ambition remains attached to a one-off hardware model.
From there, I reduce the situation to a small number of decisions.
The Product Direction advisory mandate is then shaped around the evidence, people and work needed to make those decisions.
A typical decision
A premium home-appliance brand had spent years adding products around a category in which it was already strong.
None of the additions looked too adventurous: a smaller model addressing small apartments, a more capable one moving upwards in price, connected functions that appeared when the category was becoming connected, and new finishes following changes and trends in interiors.
Seen individually, the decisions were difficult to argue with.
Seen together, something had changed: the range still looked coherent in a catalogue, but it was becoming less clear what the brand wanted to be particularly good at. And consequently, which products deserved the next serious investment.
The question was no longer which gap in the range to fill.
It was which direction was worth making visible through the product.
Product Direction helped turn a collection of reasonable options into a choice about where the product should go next.