P4 Framework

We often find our clients have constrained resources because they end up with multiple custom development efforts evolving in parallel, with no economies of scale. This situation emerges when a customer base grows rapidly, when the product portfolio runs wild or when the product development and management functions are out of alignment. Companies in industries where the product discipline is mature endeavor to have as few platforms as possible, customized as little as possible and delivered through as many points of delivery as possible to a wide range of customers. This same model can be applied to any type of business if there is the motivation to tune the product development and management functions and match it to an optimized product portfolio.

Fewer platforms, greater leverage.

Think about the building blocks, or platforms, that come together to create your products and services and how you get them into the hands of your customers. Do you find your product portfolio peppered with custom enhancements or one-offs? Do your new product releases offer significant capabilities of value to your customers or are they full of maintenance and iterative, feature improvements?


Our P4 Framework offers a unique approach to optimizing product and platform portfolios, tuning the product organization and creating product roadmaps that deliver growth and meet profitability targets. By using P4, we are able to take a disciplined, granular look at every function and building block that must come together to deliver a product portfolio. In particular, the P4 lens allows us to quickly uncover all of the functions supporting development and delivery of products or services and how they work, or don’t work, together. 

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We start with the products or services you sell and work our way out along four important dimensions in order to create your product portfolio and organization blueprint:
  • Products – what products and services are being developed and delivered to customers
  • Platforms – the underlying components or processes that are used to build and deliver the products and services (we like to call this building blocks)
  • Points of Delivery - the key points of engagement or interface with customers; often the places in the delivery process where customers interact with the company, its products and services
  • Projects – any initiative with a defined beginning and end, not to be confused with products or platforms; most often associated with technology or IT but equally important are other types of projects (marketing, sales, adoption, training, manufacturing etc)

Assess and prescribe actions.

The P4 framework is a powerful tool for assessing your portfolio of products, projects and platforms. The process of applying P4 often reveals new opportunities for leverage across the organization and identifies bottlenecks that may be constraining your development and deployment pipelines. A management team that uses the P4 Framework becomes tightly aligned around the critical issues and can make better decisions about allocating resources. Without P4, a product or platform team may become singularly focused on their own development milestones without visibility into related projects or understanding of how Project X will impact Product Y. The result is an integrated approach to planning that will maximize the return on effort across the organization. Are your developers spread too thin across too many products? Are your platforms really able to support the delivery of multiple products? Are you spending time and effort on one-off initiatives that have little upside? P4 will expose all that, and more – giving you the power to accomplish more, with less.