The Portfolio Sweet Spot:
How to Use Customer Value to Set Product Priorities

Study after study has shown the leading cause of failure in launching new products is failure to meet customers’ needs! Yet companies are still driving launch decisions based on “the numbers,” letting projected financial performance – not measured customer value – be the deciding factor.

The key to choosing innovative new products that contribute to sustainable profitability lies in changing the business focus of portfolio management from financial metrics to customer value. Paradoxically, by putting aside financial data and giving more weight to customer value data when making product portfolio decisions, companies can in fact improve financial performance by identifying a stream of new products with the potential to delight customers. Customer value -- unlike many financial projections and contrary to the beliefs of many executives -- is based on something real, which you can accurately measure to yield trustworthy results.

By participating in this session, you will learn about the tools, skills and techniques that you should use to drive your innovation and portfolio management decisions.

Specifically you will learn:

• Where is the portfolio “sweet spot” and how do you get there?

• What is “strategic balance” and how do you achieve it?

• How do you organize/structure the portfolio management process to effectively coordinate/manage all of this?

• And how do you implement/roll out this new approach so it is sustainable? 

 In addition, this session will:

• Help you understand critical customer empathic interaction/interviewing techniques – techniques that will enable you to pinpoint the customer pain that drives their buying decisions.

• Show you tools and processes you can use to recognize the potential for value-driven innovation and then successfully integrate these innovation insights into your portfolio. 

• Explain how best to structure the portfolio review process - at multiple levels and multiple time scales - to create a steady flow of product successes from the portfolio.

To ensure that this presentation has maximum relevance, we will use examples and case studies to fully imbed the teachings in the real world of intense competition and rapid business change.

The session will be a 90-minute presentation with frequent opportunities for questions & answers and includes:

• Hardcopy of presentation slides sent to your office prior to session

• Your questions answered by an expert

Invite your whole team to join you - the fee is the same as long as you are on one line, just put it on speakerphone!

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Richard Tait is a Principal with PDC who brings more than 25 years of hands-on industrial and consulting experience in the areas of product innovation, R&D/technology management, voice-of-customer, new business development and portfolio management to his work with clients. Richard’s accomplishments include a 22 year career at DuPont highlighted by positions as Lab Director for DuPont Diagnostic Imaging and Co-founder/Innovation Manager at DuPont’s Center for Creativity and Innovation. Richard is certified as a New Product Development Professional by the Product Development and Management Association and is a member of the board of the Greater Philadelphia chapter of that organization. His publication “Better New Business Development at DuPont” received the Maurice Holland award in November 2003 from the Industrial Research Institute as best paper of the year in Research-Technology Management. And he is a co-author of the recently published book Value Innovation Portfolio Management – Achieving Double Digit Growth through Customer Value.