Achieving the Impossible with a Hyper-Collaborative Product Strategy

In today's fast-paced market, customers demand nothing less than the best, and they have instant access to countless options.

Product companies are engaged in a fierce race to outperform their competitors by delivering products of unparalleled quality and providing superior customer experiences.

To win this race, a revolutionary approach is essential—one that unites all teams around one single product truth. This means establishing real-time visibility and fostering collaboration as the bedrock of operations. Product and commercial teams must work in seamless synchronization, relentlessly driving their products to market faster than the competition. 

Doing all of this WHILE constantly innovating, juggling risk management, and heading off supply chain disruption seems like an insurmountable ask.

But here’s the thing: this is precisely what product value management (PVM) was designed to do. 

How can I manage the impossible with PVM?

All of these modern-day problems are complex to be sure. The good news is that when PVM is delivered by a powerful platform such as Propel Software, all you need to get started is to press the proverbial “Go” button.

Let’s take a closer look at how it works.

Part I: Defeat Silos with Contextual Collaboration

As established, the customer is now the star of the show when it comes to driving the market—influencing how the product gets developed, when and where they buy it, how and why they use it, and how well it gets serviced. 

Most companies are playing catch up to this new reality, using a hodge-podge collection of older systems and manual fixes to cobble together a process for customer-centricity.

PVM is therefore not just about cost saving and efficiency (though it delivers those), it's about revenue growth, capturing market share, and delighting customers. It’s about greater visibility, faster decision-making, and working in parallel across the entire company instead of in serial to get products to market faster. 

You can try and try in this environment, but ultimately product information will be lost, incorrect, or never found. Let alone reviewed by all the people who need to make key decisions. 

PVM represents a revolutionary approach that puts the customer at the center of the product experience innately. It does so with a continuous product thread that runs from the very start of concepting all the way through to post-market activities.

The thread runs through engineering, operations, and quality teams, as well as sales, service, and marketing teams. That end-to-end connection is the core foundation that makes PVM so vital. 

Although most solution providers understand the importance of this thread, Propel (who introduced PVM) is the only platform designed with contextual collaboration woven throughout all value chain processes.

As soon as a member of your team (truly anyone—design, product, quality, finance, marketing, sales, service, etc.) deviates from your single source of product truth—that’s a gap. That’s depreciation in your product value, and ultimately, profit.

Without PVM, fixing these value gaps is an extremely slippery business—they can happen with every extraneous email, every outdated Excel file, or every time a manual handoff results in an error or compromises a deadline. 

Other big box industry platform providers may speak about organizational silos as a problem that needs solving, but PVM is the only category that actively does something about it. Just as these providers are often only closing the ‘loops’ (lowercase) within individual teams rather than the big ‘L’ Loop that weaves in the customer—they’re also thinking small when it comes to creating a truly enterprise-wide collaborative environment. 

That’s because their focus is still primarily on “back office” activities—the product side–design, quality, engineering, supplier management, etc.

PVM, however, impacts both the top and bottom lines. With PVM, the back office is fully integrated with the “front office”—the customer-facing teams such as sales, marketing, branding, service, etc.

PVM is therefore not just about cost saving and efficiency (though it delivers those), it's about revenue growth, capturing market share, and delighting customers. It’s about greater visibility, faster decision-making, and working in parallel across the entire company instead of in serial to get products to market faster. 

None of the aforementioned value gaps would ever occur because there wouldn’t be any collaborative effort that could not be performed within the platform. 

All your company’s business needs—even those that seem hyper-specific—can be addressed within the framework of the application. All your current clunky and manual workflows can be set up in a highly flexible, collaborative environment, and can even be automated to speed your time-to-revenue that much more. 

How?

Part II: A Continuous, Configurable Product Thread

An approach that promises all that PVM does requires a flexible solution.

Flexible enough to meet the needs of ever-changing customers and markets,

to constantly innovate, and of course to prepare for unexpected shocks. By its very nature, PVM functionality needs to evolve over time... it can't remain stagnant over 20 years the way PLM has.

And the buzz around this is backed up. Gartner reported in its July 2022 Market Guide for PLM Software in Discrete Manufacturing Industries that, “By the end 2025, 30% of available PLM applications will be built on top of composable technologies.” 

All of this boils down to a form of magic called composable architecture. 

You may have already heard the term bandied around recently: “no code/low code.” It’s a key attribute of composable architecture. 

The possibility of users being able to configure and make changes to software with clicks instead of code is generating a lot of industry buzz. And for good reason—it makes the application user’s work faster, more flexible, and more cost-effective. 

And the buzz around this is backed up. Gartner reported in its July 2022 Market Guide for PLM Software in Discrete Manufacturing Industries that, “By the end 2025, 30% of available PLM applications will be built on top of composable technologies.” 

Here’s the kicker—Propel has been built on top of composable technology since 2015,

a solid decade before the accuracy of Gartner’s prediction will be tested.

So, what we’re really talking about is the future of product lifecycle management—and thanks to Propel, PVM is already there.

Composable architecture is just as it sounds—a user interface (UI) framework that allows features to be manipulated quickly by developers and business users alike, using highly customizable, drag-and-drop components.

This has been a trend in UI and UX design for quite a while now but has yet to take over the enterprise software market. Not surprising with many product companies so (emotionally) invested in their inflexible legacy technology that switching to a more modern environment continues to be pushed off and deprioritized.

But let’s not forget the digital-first, omnichannel market whose only constant is change. Whose only accurate forecast is its unpredictability. With the customer on the proverbial throne (for the foreseeable future), there isn’t really a good excuse to delay any opportunity to become more flexible. Especially in a down market, the best time to become more nimble.

To that end, the best-in-class companies are harnessing the power of change, rather than resisting it. They’re leveraging the bottomless well of innovation that is composable technology to remain nimble. 

To zig when the market says to zig, to zag when their customers say to zag.

When every user at the company has the ability to design their own workflows and automated processes without even one line of code, the game is completely changed. You’re no longer waiting for long, arduous release cycles from an IT team or enterprise developers. 

If your business needs it, you can create it at that moment.

Part III: A Cure for Every Pain (PVM Use Cases)

Supply chain risk looming? Regulatory standards in flux? Unexpected customer feedback? All of these and more can be addressed when your whole organization is working within the same platform, receiving the same alerts. 

That’s the power of connecting product and customer teams, a single continuous product thread, contextual collaboration, and ultimately, PVM.

PVM drives product value by addressing the problems that previous technology categories have only ever alluded to solving. It does so by enabling a truly continuous product thread as a single source of truth—one that is still flexible enough to evolve as markets evolve. One that can’t become outdated the way PLM has over time.

For businesses to keep up today, they need a platform that helps them: grow business, innovate, increase productivity, optimize customer experience, and mitigate risk.

Luckily for them, all of these capabilities are PVM’s exact wheelhouse.

The new ultimate guide to product value management explains how PVM is the natural evolution of the product lifecycle strategy, developed to meet the needs of today’s market and to keep pace with tomorrow’s.

Get your own PVM Handbook and bring your company into the product value era.