In order to maintain its strong market position, a global media company launched a strategic initiative to increase its focus on developing total product solutions. To execute this strategy, it recruited a new head of Product Development, who quickly realized the organization was not designed appropriately to support integrated product development. Specifically: 1) there was no single point of accountability for product strategy and planning; 2) limited communication and collaboration existed between the Business Units, the Global Product Office, and Product Development shops; and 3) multiple development processes were not aligned to the needs of the Business Units.

What We Did

Monitor facilitated a process, which brought together the Business Units and Product Development groups, to design a new operating model based on Core Product Teams. Key roles, such as Product Sponsors and Product Development Leads, were established and defined; processes and tools to support integrated product development were designed and tested with key constituents; and a governance structure was created to resolve cross-Business Unit conflicts associated with product development. To support implementation, Monitor launched and monitored a pilot to test the new team structure prior to full implementation of the model.

Results

One year after implementation of the Core Product Team and the new Product Development Organization structures, the company has seen dramatic improvements in performance across a variety of dimensions, including an average of 24% savings in dollars spent on functionality delivered and more than a 300% decrease in time to market for two key growth products.