New Smart Services Solution Development & Strategy

A well known test and measurement product and systems brand wanted to better understand the customer adoption and competitive environment for its proposed new smart services offering.

Our client, historically a very product-focused organization and culture, could not achieve consensus among its leadership on how to stage and introduce a new connected product and msart services solution. Harbor worked with their leadership team, marketing organization, technologists, and services management to help our client better understand evolving user needs, solution packaging alternatives, pricing strategy as well as alternative business models to help develop their business case and market-entry strategy.

Initially our team analyzed existing business case, conducted customer and competitive research to augment and extend internal findings.  Beyond this initial work to frame the client’s target growth opportunity, these additional work streams were conducted:

1. We worked with the client’s team to identify the key activities and elements in the design of the customer’s “connected” experience that their new solution should focus, including  what new connectivity, content, and data values were available that could be uniquely leveraged.

2. Our focus then turned to how our client should be thinking about their platform and solution, including service delivery and support capabilities as well as how re-imagine user interactions with the platform solution and how to organize the user experience in a differentiating manner.
3. We then facilitated working sessions with customers and ecosystem constituents to validate discoveries and build a strong shared understanding of adoption drivers as well as appropriate revenue model design.
4. From here, we worked with the team to develop their go-to-market and ecosystem and alliance strategy as part of the overall go-to-market strategy.

As a team, we determined that by redesigning their existing products they could develop new and distinct data-management and analytics services that would not only meet their customers’ needs, but provide increased value-add analysis of how their measurement products were actually being used.  At this point, the focus of the engagement shifted to gaining trust and buy-in with senior leadership concerning the path forward and investment.

We led a series of workshops to align the core working team’s knowledge and learnings with senior management expectations. The team’s primary goal became getting leadership to adopt a new and ‘adjusted’ view of the growth opportunity and to really open their eyes to the impacts new IoT and connected solutions could deliver to their customers.

In follow on conversations with our client after the engagement, we came to realize that our work helped to build greater shared empathy and understanding across seemingly disparate internal functions within the client organization which enabled less finger pointing and higher trust.  The client has since made two acquisitions to accelerate the growth of this new line of business.