Customer Reviews

Product Strategy for High Technology Companies

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After founding a leading market research firm and teaching New Product Development at Harvard, I found this book so compelling that our firm has completed a review of our entire new web research product strategy, and come to some startling and highly productive insights on how to proceed and succeed. It is by far the most practical, in-depth guide to achieving competitive new product development strategies I have ever read.

The book shows clearly how to answer the critical questions: 1) Where do we want to go, 2) How will we get there, and 3) Why will we be successful. It shows how to create a Core Strategic Vision that is the foundation for new product success. And it shows how to use that vision to create highly competitive and profitable product lines, particularly in high technology.

Having tested new product ideas for hundreds of companies over the last 25 years, it is difficult to think of more than a handful who couldn't have benefited from not only reading this book, but doing what it recommends.

There are countless strategy books out there. Each one has an overriding framework that the entire book is based on, that often warrants only a 15-page article. This book is loaded with practical frameworks that together provide a thinking and creativity-channeling approach. Better yet, every framework has been proven in practice at dozens of companies by the author's implementation-based consulting firm. Each chapter is filled with examples from a broad range of technology-based companies. When applying these frameworks outside of technology-based industries and large companies just use common sense to strip them down to their essence and don't worry about the fancy techno-speak. You can also use most chapters as stand-alone strategy tools. I personally like "vectors of differentiation" and wonder how so many companies blow it when it seems like common sense. But then again if common sense were common, books like this wouldn't be needed. And then there's the issue of actually implementing what you come up with...

I love this book: the concept of a "vector" for product
development is a terrific way to think about competition.
IMHO, this book is a must-read for all product managers,
product marketers and people involved in strategic decisions,
i.e. all senior executives.

That said, speaking as a five-time startup engineer, the advice
and examples in this book seem geared towards the core product
lines in larger companies, where you can credibly talk about
"two years from now" as opposed to wondering if you'll even be
in business, which is also the problem for new product lines at
large companies. The experience for the book comes from the
PRTM consulting firm, which was made famous for their work with
parallel product development at Intel. We hired them in the
early days at Inktomi, and found mixed success with their
process because we were terrified of immediate failure, and
they wanted to talk about version 3. Obviously, there's a
successful middle ground because Inktomi was a huge success in
the short term, but ultimately lost its strategic direction.

In his richly illustrated Product Strategy for High Technology Companies, Michael E. McGrath rightly describes product strategy as a management process. Like any process, product strategy defines structure, timing, responsibilities, and skills. The process architecture reproduced on page 359 provides a practical framework starting with the definition of core strategic vision. Core strategic vision requires answering three questions: 1. Where do we want to go? 2. How will we get there? 3. And most critical Why will we be successful? Core strategic vision determines the criteria used for reaching a strategic balance in the product development process: Focus vs. diversification, short-term vs. long-term, current product platform vs. new product platform, business Alpha vs. business Beta, research vs. development, and high risk vs. low risk. Available resources influence the outlook of strategic balance.

Core strategic vision, strategic balance, core competencies, and competitive strategy are together the foundations on which the often-ignored product platform strategy is built. Product platform strategy is the lowest common denominator of relevant technology in a set of products or a product line. Product failures in high-tech companies frequently can be traced to an incomplete product platform strategy according to McGrath. Strategic balance, product platform strategy, and competitive strategy are together the foundations of product line strategy. Product line strategy is where specific product offerings are defined.

Core strategic vision also influences the competitive strategy that high technology companies must define. McGrath provides an in-depth, practical review of differentiation strategy, pricing strategy, and supporting strategies. Supporting strategies are first-to-market and fast-follower strategies, cannibalization, and global product strategy. McGrath's examination of both time-based strategies and cannibalization is particularly interesting because both subjects are rarely covered in such a luxury of detail. McGrath finally examines the optional expansion strategy and innovation strategy. High technology companies only need them if they want to invest in expansion or innovation.

To summarize, Product Strategy for High Technology Companies is a practical guide to a management process from which even product managers from outside the high tech industry can draw useful lessons and more importantly apply them to their own product strategy.

This is a key book that provides an innovative look at a critical subject. After infinite books on "how" to get products to market, here is a very valuable analysis of "what" to bring to market, how to leverage and extend a company's capability base. Product Strategy will have an enormous impact on the senior managers that read it and on the companies that implement its findings. It is full of useful methodologies and gripping examples, and provides a great balance of strategic vision and operational guidance.

If I was unfamiliar with this book I'd have three concerns: is it too old to be useful, are the product strategy proposals by the author compelling, complete, and thoroughly conveyed, and does the author make the ideas accessible with the appropriate use of real business examples.

Time:

There are two kinds of valuable business books: the timely and the timeless. Timely books capture the best examples of the disruptors of the moment and explain how they are changing everything. 'The world is flat' is my favorite timely business book, but a reading of it in 2010 shows how 5 years has aged the core ideas in the book... at this point they are a quaint history, a monograph of better days. 'Product Strategy for High Technology Companies' is the other kind of book. Despite being twice as old (copyright 2000), and actually principally written in its first edition in the 90s, this book remains relevant and useful in all of its core ideas. Over the last decade I have deployed the framework in this book in situations from ground zero of a startup to an 80 year old bank. I find that my own familiarity with its methods and content make it more valuable over time; each new context deepens my understanding of the ideas the author was trying to convey.

Core Ideas:

Unlike, for example, 'Blue Ocean Strategy' or 'The Long Tail', this book is not the product of a single moment of inspiration, 10 pages of thought wrapped in 300 pages of helium and a sparkly package. This book is clearly the product of many years spent working and thinking, tuning, and reviewing. I would put this in the same class as Michael Porter's books - a plurality of rigorous high quality thought meshed into a complete and internally consistent methodology. There are no weak chapters, and in contrast to Mr. Porter's denser works, the writing is accessible.

Use of examples:

I will often misunderstand an author or a speaker until they illustrate their point with an example, so if a book is to be useful to me it must support every key idea with an application of the idea and an outcome. Many popular business books take this too far. Some writers are such beautiful story tellers - Malcolm Gladwell comes to mind - that the business points that the story is there to illustrate are subordinated. In this book, the examples are subordinate to the concept and they are not fictive - they are real business history. They are entertaining enough to carry the reader's interest through a sometimes ambitious or challenging idea, numerous enough to illustrate ideas robustly, and brief and meaty enough to keep the reader focused on the point.

Until such time as the author and publisher re-team for a third edition - which I would very much welcome - I consider this to be the best product strategy guide that Amazon has on its shelves, even 10 years after publication.

Bought this book in 2004 and I am surprised myself at being able to apply principles from this book to this very day. Buy it, read it and keep it on your desk!

Product Strategy for High technology Companies by Robert Cooper. I purchased the book with the intention of getting my professional certification in product management. The is extremely helpful in the area of product planning and development. It links the technology strategy of a company to its product platform development strategy down to its product line planning strategy. I like the way the book is structured, building up from vision to techniques. His case studies / examples (though not in depth)are very good in illustrating what he was trying to say.

I read this book five years and now found myself skimming it again. This book has a lot of substance and appealing frameworks. Most of the content is timeless and is still valid today. Here are a couple of basic takeaways that I still remember five years later:

* Focus on one single aspect of the product that you make unique and so entrenched in your whole system and business model that it cannot easily be copied by the competition. Then you copy everything else, just make it good enough. Now, the author describes this in more eloquent terms like "vector of differentiation".

* Make a very clear distinction between product platform strategy and product strategy. The unique differentiator (what the author calls "defining technology") should be a part of the platform.

However, for people in start-ups and smaller companies with rapidly changing markets and a high density of entrepreneurial personalities, some of the models are overly complex and the examples are mostly taken from large organizations. It's hard to rally small organizations around a 3-year product plan and product lines when you can barely predict one quarter ahead.

This is an excellent book about product strategy for high technology companies. It is very thorough, concise and the author has a very systematic approach handling the subject. You will learn the basics and there are a lot of examples of past successes and failures of product strategies.

The book consists of four parts:
Part 1: Framework for product strategy. You start with the Core Strategic Vision, then you go to Strategy, Product Platform Strategy, Product line Strategy to Expansion Framework.

Part 2: Competition strategy. You start with Vectors of differentiation and go to pricing, first to market vs fast followers strategy, thinking globally, etc.

Part 3: Growth strategies: acquisitions, etc.

Part 4: Full explanation of the process of product strategy.

You definitely need to give this book a go if you are involved with product strategy within a high tech company!