At the corporate level, most executives can look at their annual plan and tell you what the priorities are, and which activities are more or less important. Leaders of product organizations and product champions, however, manage to plans that are sure to be pummeled with change: business priorities are fluid, market factors have impact, products progress through different points in their lifecycle and the overall portfolio is in a continuous state of flux. With changes, priorities often shift and companies can quickly find themselves with high competency in areas that are no longer identified as critical to success. Conversely, when organizational competency is lower than a particular priority, it may be time to consider shifting focus to bring them into alignment in order to continue executing on the right things. Identifying any gaps and mapping them to what matters most is a great way to illuminate any misalignment between priorities and competencies so that investments have impact. One place to start is to consider the priorities for Commercial (outward facing) activities and then do the same for Development & Operations (internally focused) activities for a given plan year. Then plot those on a 2x2 for each area and see what they say.
Activities that fall into the lower left or upper right quadrants are in alignment: lower left means low priority, low competency (while never a good thing to have truly low competency, for this purpose it is fine) while upper right indicates high priority and high competency. Activities that fall into the upper left quadrant are the ones that need to be most closely examined since high priority and low competency is recipe for a problem. Activities in the lower right quadrant should also be reviewed to be sure there isn't over investment or spending relative to priority. An annual assessment of organizational competencies versus product priorities should be incorporated into your regular product planning process. Just as decisions are made about which products will receive funding and which will be decommissioned, a disciplined approach to tuning competencies to priorities needs to become part of the organization’s DNA.
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