Product Strategy on MYLES — Strategy & Innovation Consulting

Building an Innovation Culture in Enterprise Organizations

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Culture Delusion

“We need to change our innovation culture.”

If I had a euro for every time a VP of Innovation said this to me, I could fund a reasonably sized Series A. It is the default diagnosis for every innovation failure: our products are mediocre because our culture does not support innovation. The prescription follows logically: change the culture.

The result is a predictable parade of culture initiatives. Innovation labs. Hackathons. Failure celebrations (“fail fast, fail forward!”). Inspirational posters featuring Einstein quotes. Innovation ambassadors with colorful lanyards. Maybe a trip to Silicon Valley to absorb the California vibe.

From Customer Insights to Product Roadmap: The Translation Problem

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Insight Graveyard

Every enterprise innovation team has one. A folder — digital or physical — full of research reports that nobody reads anymore. Customer interview transcripts. Ethnographic studies. Survey results. Design sprint outputs. Personas that were workshopped with great enthusiasm and then never referenced again.

This is the insight graveyard. And its existence reveals the central failure of most enterprise product organizations: the inability to translate customer insights into roadmap decisions.

Innovation Metrics: Measuring What Matters Beyond Patent Counts

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Vanity Metric Trap

How does your company measure innovation? If your answer includes patent counts, R&D spending as a percentage of revenue, number of ideas generated, or percentage of revenue from “new” products, you are measuring innovation theater — the appearance of innovation activity — rather than innovation effectiveness.

These metrics are everywhere. Boards love them. Annual reports feature them. Innovation consultants benchmark against them. And they are, at best, weakly correlated with actual innovation outcomes.

Product Discovery: Methods for Finding What to Build Next

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Backward Discovery Problem

Most enterprise product teams believe they do product discovery. They interview customers. They run surveys. They attend trade shows and listen to what the market is saying. They compile feature request lists from sales teams and support tickets.

And yet, despite all this effort, their hit rate on new products hovers around the industry average: roughly six out of ten fail to meet business objectives.

The problem is not that these teams skip discovery. The problem is that their discovery process is backward. They start with solutions and work back toward problems. They ask customers “what do you want?” instead of “what are you trying to accomplish?” They catalog feature requests instead of measuring unmet outcomes. They let the loudest voices — whether internal champions or key accounts — set the agenda.

Product Strategy for Enterprise Innovation Leaders

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Why Most Enterprise Product Strategies Fail Before They Start

Here is a number that should disturb you: according to a 2023 study by the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA), 40% of new products launched by established companies fail to meet their business objectives. Not startups working with seed money and gut instinct — established enterprises with dedicated R&D budgets, experienced product teams, and decades of market knowledge.

The problem is not a lack of strategy. Walk into any product planning meeting at a Fortune 500 company and you will find strategy documents. Plenty of them. The problem is that most enterprise product strategies are built on a foundation of sand: internal assumptions dressed up as customer insights, competitive benchmarking mistaken for differentiation, and roadmaps driven by the loudest executive rather than the most important customer outcome.

Product Strategy Frameworks: A Comparative Guide

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Framework Problem

Enterprise product leaders are not short of frameworks. They are drowning in them. Porter’s Five Forces. Blue Ocean Strategy. Lean Startup. Design Thinking. Jobs to Be Done. The JTBD Growth Strategy Matrix. Each comes with its own books, consultants, certifications, and promises.

The result is not clarity but confusion. Product teams cherry-pick elements from multiple frameworks without understanding their underlying assumptions. They apply startup methodologies to enterprise contexts. They use competitive analysis tools to answer customer needs questions. And they wonder why their product strategies produce middling results.

Product-Market Fit for B2B: Enterprise-Specific Considerations

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Product-Market Fit Myth in Enterprise B2B

Marc Andreessen’s famous formulation — “product-market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market” — has become gospel in the startup world. And in the startup world, it works reasonably well. You launch a product, observe whether customers are pulling it out of your hands, and know within months whether you have fit.

Try applying this to a crane manufacturer selling to construction companies across Europe. Or a medical device company with an 18-month regulatory approval cycle. Or an agricultural equipment maker whose customers buy once every seven years.

Value Proposition Design Using Jobs to Be Done

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Value Proposition Precision Problem

Every B2B company has a value proposition. Most of them sound the same.

“We deliver innovative solutions that help our customers improve efficiency and reduce costs.” Change the company name and this sentence could describe any industrial manufacturer in Europe. It communicates nothing specific. It differentiates from nothing. It resonates with no one in particular.

The problem is not that product teams lack effort or intelligence. The problem is that traditional value proposition design methods — even well-regarded ones like Osterwalder’s Value Proposition Canvas — lack the precision needed to create propositions that genuinely resonate with specific customer segments.

Developing Product Strategy: From Vision to Roadmap

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

What Passes for Product Strategy in Most Companies

Let us be direct: what gets called “product strategy” in most B2B companies is a PowerPoint presentation with a vision statement on slide three and a feature list on slide seventeen. In between: market trend observations, competitive comparisons, and an optimistic revenue projection that nobody seriously believes.

That is not a strategy. That is a wish list with context.

A real product strategy answers three questions with precision:

When to Engage Product Strategy Consultants (And When Not To)

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Honest Answer No Consultant Will Give You

Most articles about whether to hire product strategy consultants are written by product strategy consultants. That tells you something about their objectivity. I will give you a different answer — one that sometimes means recommending you do not hire us.

The decision to engage external product strategy help is not primarily about capability. Most competent product organizations have capable people. The question is whether external expertise can change the outcome in a way that justifies the cost, the disruption, and the inevitable internal politics that come with outside involvement. Sometimes the answer is yes. Often it is no. The difference lies in the specific conditions your organization faces.

Innovation Portfolio Management: Balancing Core and New

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Portfolio That Manages You

Most companies that believe they manage an innovation portfolio are actually managed by one. They have existing product lines that generate the revenue used to fund next-generation development. Those existing lines have customers, commitments, and internal advocates who are very good at making the case for incremental improvement. New growth opportunities have hypothetical future value and internal advocates who are newer, less senior, and less skilled at organizational politics.

Measuring Product Innovation: Metrics That Actually Matter

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Measurement Theater Problem

Every VP of Product or Innovation I speak with can tell me how many new products they launched last year, how many patents their engineers filed, and what their R&D spending is as a percentage of revenue. Almost none of them can tell me whether those launches addressed the customer outcomes that were most underserved, what proportion of their R&D investment targeted genuinely unmet needs, or how the satisfaction of their customers’ most important outcomes has changed over the past three years.

The Product Leader's Guide to Customer-Centric Decision Making

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Gap Between Believing in Customers and Deciding Based on Them

Almost every product organization claims to be customer-centric. The language is everywhere: customer obsession, voice of the customer, putting the customer first. It appears in mission statements, company values, and product strategy decks. It is invoked in roadmap meetings as a rhetorical trump card — “but what do the customers actually want?”

And yet the majority of product decisions in B2B companies are not made based on systematic, quantified customer evidence. They are made based on the opinions of internal advocates, the loudest customer complaint from the most recent sales call, the competitive feature that the market analyst flagged in a report, or the engineering team’s judgment about what is technically interesting. The customer is present in the language but absent from the evidence.