The complexity of our customers' product and service offerings, the dynamics of the market and the discrepancy between market offerings and market expectations have increased rapidly in recent years.

It is therefore not surprising that the management of a product portfolio offering, the constant need for ever new innovations, new products and complementary services is increasingly challenging the capabilities of traditional product management.

We focus our strategic consulting services precisely on the needs and opportunities of strategically oriented product and innovation management.

On the one hand, it is about giving product management a strategic dimension in order to get more out of the practical / tactical / operational mode of portfolio management and, at the same time, to give the company management a strategic visionary and steering dimension for the development of the product and service portfolio, with which the company as a whole can be brought forward in accordance with a corporate strategy.

Our 20 years of experience in a wide variety of industry and sector contexts is a particularly great asset for our clients here. In addition to operational, tactical development experience, we also bring an eye for strategic and qualitative growth, new positioning and further development of the portfolio or the company as a whole.

This multidimensional competence makes Squareone an operational consultant who both analyses and identifies problems and proposes measures, as well as instrumentally contributes to solving the identified problems.

For strategic portfolio consulting, we have developed a format that enables us and our clients to shed light on the opportunities, risks and potentials of strategic portfolio development. We look at different aspects of innovation and product development, which gives us an outside perspective on the company and strategic portfolio development potential.

Typical aspects of a 360° analysis are, among others, the consideration of innovation processes, product development processes, product and portfolio communication, a competitive benchmark, the consideration of strategic corporate goals and their convergence with the portfolio, the strategic roadmap or portfolio planning, the functioning and organisational structure or the integration of strategic product management in the roadmap planning, the portfolio structure and its economic efficiency and the dimensionality of the product portfolio in terms of hardware, software and service.

At the end of this review, we compile strengths, weaknesses, potentials and risks and develop a package of possible measures that can then be translated into a subsequent mandate. Typically, a 360° analysis results in 10-20 possible work packages that can be worked on internally and or with external partners. Whether, which and with whom work packages are subsequently implemented is entirely at the discretion of our clients and is independent of the analysis.

Putting the customer at the centre of any development is a goal that is often formulated, but which fails due to the procedural realities, the time pressure or the economic realities of many projects.

In order to anticipate the needs of tomorrow, it is no longer enough to concentrate on what is technically feasible, to measure one's development in terms of costs and profit and to optimise one's own processes or product structure. If we really want to succeed in developing in line with the market and needs, we must be prepared to invest time, money and know-how to identify and understand them in the first place.

Needs are already a synthesis of previous analysis and in tomorrow's world we will not only have to analyse intelligently, but may also have to take responsibility for creating tomorrow's needs ourselves, measuring them against goals of sustainability, humanity and their meaningfulness.

We help our clients to systematically and analytically integrate the perspective of the user and the user into the development and thus gain a decisive advantage over the competition.

For us, a development project begins accordingly with the user and the user, with the analysis of the need, the market conditions and the contextual conditions of use.

We collect expressed and unexpressed needs in equal measure and use interviews, structured observations, shadowing and immersion processes for this purpose.

We complement this with a systematic observation of the (indirect) competition and identify further potentials, strengths and weaknesses by looking at the larger economic context.

It is possible that tomorrow our company and what we do will look completely different from what we generate value with today. Together with our clients, we invest in intelligent demand analytics, anticipate unspoken but observable needs and translate them into future-proof solutions, whether they are physical, digital or metaphysical.