Solution Packaging Is a Product Problem - Follow Up Story
A lifecycle framework for turning modular products into repeatable customer outcomes
What happened after writing a recent Product Management IRL article? These insights are for paid subscribers to Product Management IRL.
This week’s backstory is about solution packages:
What Prompted This Article?
I was seeing two different ways to package a group of products:
General product documentation with architectures, picture stacks and sometimes whitepapers on the products working together
Configuration tools that group multiple products for ordering and managing through a consolidated dashboard
A product manager on my team, Vivek, was packaging the first way. Vivek was becoming the bottleneck to sales because each potential customer had something unique.
I wrote this article to explore if Vivek could take a small step to the second way. Here is the small step I had in mind:
Next, I imagined how Vivek could move from left to right and create a solution package. The desired outcome is less dependency on Vivek for each potential customer.
I defined a light process to watch for customer patterns, define a grouping and maintain the solution package.
I planned to give the lifecycle a try before talking to Vivek about using it.
