Product Leadership

The idea behind working capital is that a business should always have more assets than liabilities.

You call several doctors’ offices and tell them you have a fixed budget and timeline to work with and will be selecting a winner from competitive bids. How do you think this scenario ends? The most qualified doctors laugh at your suggested process and ignore you. The least qualified doctors low-ball the budget to get the work. Good luck with your surgery. When you bid out a product creation project to outside firms with a fixed budget and timeline, you’re doing the same thing. In these situations, the rates used by the outside partner undervalue its effort, and the client’s reliance on the comparative market rates as the metric simply reinforces this undervaluation. This is a lose-lose scenario. If the project is undervalued, the firm or studio will fail to meet its obligations, and the client won’t get the quality it desires.

Every business has a solar system of partners, agencies, customers, external stakeholders, and vendors that orbit their core business and help them deliver value. In these enlightened customer-centric times, it might be more accurate to say that each product company is orbiting the customer.