About Product Acuity
Product Acuity is a management consulting firm specializing in helping firms grow thier business and improve thier organization's effectiveness through innovative use of information and computer technologies. We provide a unique blend of business leadership, market expertise, and technical knowledge to help our clients in activities ranging from innovating new products to improving internal processes. Our services focus on the following areas:
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Identifying market opportunities that not only provide for new growth, but also work to disrupt and transform existing markets and place you in a leadership position.
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Leading development and implementation of business strategies, operational plans, and new programs that leverage your strengths, transform your weaknesses into competitive advantages, and drive evolution of your capabilities.
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Improving your organization's ability to drive continuous improvement in efficiency and effectiveness through sustained innovation of new initiatives that delight customers, employees, constituents, and stakeholders.
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- If you are experiencing any of the following situations we can help.
- Trying to get a new concept off the ground and need temporary senior leadership to help plan, organize, and convert the idea into a defined executable program.
- New product efforts are not meeting expectations and seem to always be late to market, over budget, and produce less than planned market impact.
- Seeking a way to break away from competitiors and establish a sustainable competitive advantage on a path that delivers desired revenue and growth.
- Faced with multiple growth opportunities but need a better way to select your opportunities and focus your resources.
- Markets are mature and you need new opportunities to reinvigorate organizational innovation and growth and replace declining revenues and margins.
Our experience allows us to effective serve firms that rnage from start-ups through mid-size growth and global multi-national companies involved in both B2C and B2B engagement models. This experience also covers a diversity of vertical industries and technologies.
Our unique combination of skills allows us to bridge the worlds of sales and marketing with technical product development assuring the complete alignment needed for optimal implementation decisions and strategic programs.
Marketing executives are very well versed in positioning, differentiation, and competitive market dynamics. Technology executives are well versed in development methodologies, product architectures, and technology trends. However the capabilities of rapidly evolving technologies can significantly impact strategies while changing market dynamics can make a difference is critical design decisions. Yet in many firms these two worlds are disconnected resulting in mis-alignment between what is perceived to be a superior strategic plan, and what can acually be accomplished.
We focus on bridging the gaps between these two critical functions, and not only make sure both strategy and product implementaiton are fully aligned, but also make sure strategy is focused on the right target.
Practice Areas
The pressure to deliver the right product to the right market at the right time has never been greater.
Today's thriving companies are the ones that define, produce, and promote products that not only meet current customer needs but also position the company for future success and growth. This requires a deep understanding of: customer needs, emerging opportunities, market trends, evolving technology capabilities, competitive activities, internal strengths and weakness, and a firm foundation in business management fundamentals.
In short, it requires exceptional product management that can pull all of the pieces together and champion product programs that win the support of the entire organization. Our product management practice focuses on helping companies build world class product management capabilities, providing guidance on developing appropriate structure, process, and individual skill sets needed to navigate the challenges in the modern day organization.
Product innovation efforts within many companies focus on incremental improvements to established product lines in order to maintain current competitive position. However, such focus limits the opportunities for growth to the potential of the underlying served segments.
We specialize in finding disruptive opportunities that deliver entirely new value propositions, redefine competitive landscapes, and open up significant new growth opportunities. Our experience with a wide range of technologies across diverse market applications provides the insight needed to recognize opportunities not readily visible to industry veterans. These opportunities often emerge from applying technologies and solutions proven in other markets to the needs of currently served customers, or applying current product capabilities to new markets, or from leveraging different channels and business models to reach underserved market segments.
Our expert knowledge of emerging market dynamics allows us to develop business, market, and product strategies that match technology capabilities with unsatisfied needs, eliminate barriers to adoption, and drive rapid market penetration.
New product innovation is the very life blood of IT firms today as the rapid evolution of contemporary technology quickly renders established products obsolete, reconfigures competitive landscapes, and simultaneously creates new opportunities.
However, the successful creation and launch of a new product or service is one of the most complex projects a company can undertake. Our innovation process practice is focused on helping firms improve their overall efficiency and effectiveness in bringing new products to market. Whether implementing a disciplined structured approach for converting ideas into successful market launches for the first time, or addressing current limitations in an already established process, we can help.
Our expertise in fitting proven best-practices to individual cultures and personalities covers the entire innovation cycle from idea generation and opportunity identification, through concept filtering and selection, market strategy and business planning, product development, organizational readiness, and market launch.
SaaS (Software as a Service) is rapidly emerging as a disruptive force in the IT industry, transforming the very nature of the vendor-customer relationships and creating new growth opportunities.
However, SaaS is far more than subscription payments for hosted software. It has profound impact on virtually all aspects of the business including sales, marketing, finance, support, operations, product development, and customer care. Failure to recognize and effectively plan for this impact can makeentry into the SaaS market a painful if not disastrous endeavor for a classic software firm.
Our SaaS practice focuses on helping companies address the challenges of adding SaaS offerings to their product portfolios. Our services start with identification of appropriate market opportunities and continues with strategic planning,service definition, pricing, assessment and development of organizational readiness, and market launch. With our experience guiding the way, software companies can experience significant new growth opportunities through expansion into SaaS.
Web 2.0 applications and social computing technologies are changing the way the world communicates, allowing customers, business partners, and employees to easily share opinions, wants, needs, ideas, and motivations with each other.
These social computing applications are providing users with access to the right information at the right time through access to the collective intelligence and relevant experiences of others.
Our Web 2.0 practice helps clients make sense of this phenomenon and leverage it to radically improve interactions with constituents and translate it into competitive advantage in the form of increased innovation, productivity, and organizational agility. Opportunities range from improving an organizations on-line presence through web sites that allow for user generated content and community involvement to internal applications focused on improved collaboration among project and innovation team members.