A few weeks ago the Wall Street Journal ran an article on the challenges of product portfolio management and presented a strategy for keeping it under control. There was some OK points in the article, but I found one of the main recommendations to be very dangerous when it comes to new product introductions.
What I agree with in the article:
If you ask customers whether they want more variety, I can tell you right now what they’re going to say: Yes. After all, who doesn’t think they want a lot of choices? And it’s common for consumers to be both sad and angry when a product they like is discontinued
Its hard to argue with the this point. Most product categories are filled with a plethora of choices. Youngme Moon does an excellent job writing about unlimited choices in her book, Different: Escaping the competitor heard. Youngme writes,
If aliens were to visit a grocery store or a drugstore in this country, they would have to conclude that we are a people hooked on the pleasures of picking needles out of haystacks—of selecting a cereal among an ocean of cereal boxes, of selecting a bar of soap among an ocean of soap bars.
Category dilution and product over-saturation is an issue but I would argue that this a matter of portfolio tuning, not a cause to abandon ship. How that tuning is done is the real art and this is where the article lost me.
What concerns me in the article:
Consider creating product-pruning teams consisting of people with marketing, sales, finance, production, and research-and-development backgrounds. Have them meet periodically to decide which products to discontinue.
Here’s why:
