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?
Many companies build strong products without a formal product function.
Responsibility for product direction is naturally shared across engineering, commercial and leadership teams. This can work remarkably well for years. Yet as portfolios expand and markets evolve, maintaining coherence becomes increasingly difficult.
Positioning starts to vary across markets. Innovation becomes more incremental despite strong technical capability. Product decisions accumulate without a clear strategic logic until complexity quietly begins to replace clarity.
The issue is rarely competence.
Clarity fades long before performance does.
Products rarely lose relevance overnight. More often, they gradually lose the clarity that once connected them to their market.
The question is not whether companies need more consulting.
It is whether they need a different kind of external perspective.
A perspective to help in decision making, not to satisfy consulting rituals
Not every product decision deserves an external perspective.
Some do.
Usually the ones that will be difficult to reverse later.
Every product reaches a decision moment
Every decision has a starting point
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 remarkably 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. It sees differently.