Gorka Santamaria · Independent product advisor
Portfolio Snapshot
An independent review of a product portfolio
Every product portfolio is a history book
Few companies consciously design the portfolio they eventually end up with.
New products respond to new opportunities. Existing ones evolve at different speeds. Acquisitions bring unfamiliar structures. Markets expand, technologies mature and priorities shift. Each decision is perfectly reasonable on its own.
Years later, the portfolio tells a story that nobody deliberately wrote.
Some products become the natural entry point into the business, while others quietly lose their strategic role. Pricing reflects historical decisions more than commercial logic. Innovation concentrates around certain teams or technologies, and customers begin to navigate the portfolio differently from the way the organisation describes it internally.
Portfolio Snapshot begins with a simple question: does the portfolio still express the company you are trying to become, or does it increasingly reflect the company you have been?
"The review helped us realise that our products were coherent individually, but not collectively"
The discussion almost never stays with individual products
At first, the conversation often revolves around products that appear to overlap, products that seem difficult to explain, or products that no longer grow as expected.
Before long, the discussion moves elsewhere.
Why do customers enter the portfolio through one product but rarely continue to the next?
Why do sales teams explain the portfolio differently depending on the market?
Why has one product become strategically indispensable while another with similar technical merit gradually lost relevance?
And perhaps most importantly, does the portfolio still reflect the way customers think about their problems, or has it gradually become organised around the company's own structure?
These are rarely questions about product management alone.
They concern the architecture of the business itself.
"We commissioned a portfolio review. We ended up discussing the organisation behind it."
Observation before conversation
The review begins independently, by looking at the portfolio as any customer, competitor or investor would: public information, product structure, pricing logic, commercial positioning and market communication are analysed before any conversation takes place. That external reading often reveals patterns that become almost invisible inside organisations precisely because they have evolved gradually over many years.
Those first observations then become the starting point for conversations with leadership or portfolio owners. Their role is not to explain the portfolio, but to challenge the emerging interpretation, provide missing context and test whether the initial hypotheses genuinely hold.
The result is not a portfolio optimisation exercise or a rationalisation plan. It is an editorial review that attempts to explain what the portfolio reveals about the company's strategic direction and whether that direction is as coherent externally as it feels internally.