Because the software product line community comprises many more engineers than MBAs, we tend to focus our analysis more on engineering issues than on business issues. However, it is also valuable to explore the business implications that arise from dramatic engineering improvements in time-to-market, cost, quality, and portfolio scale and scope. These improvements are so large that companies can experience a "discontinuous jump" in competitive business advantage. As a result, software product line methods enable companies to leverage the power of their product line portfolios in ways not easily imagined before.

This article is based on a 4-part newletter series I wrote on software product lines and the discontinuous jump in strategic business advantage.  It is intended to engage the imagination on ways that you can take advantage of this discontinuous jump, which extend far beyond optimizing the way business is done today.

Part #1.  New Products as Commodities

With conventional software development approaches, significant resources are required to add a new product to a product line portfolio. As a result, adding a new product is most often a nontrivial business decision. This decision can involve complex negotiations between the product marketing and software development organizations, where product marketing proposes a new product with a specific benefit to the business and engineering pushes back or asks for tradeoffs with other deliverables due to time and resource scarcity.

What happens when software product line approaches reduce the development time and effort required to create new products by ninety percent?  What are the implications when your development team can respond positively to product marketing requests with ten times greater frequency?

New products become commodities rather than resource intensive investments.

When new products are commodities, the power of the product portfolio is greatly expanded -- providing the business agility needed to quickly capitalize on new revenue opportunities discovered via market predictions, feedback from customers, or feedback from prospects in the sales pipeline.

Real-world Example

I recently talked to a client whose development team had just completed their transition from a traditional development approach to software product line practice. Over the course of five months, they had tripled the size of their portfolio under development, adding a new product every four days! As a result, the development team's long-standing backlog of requests from product marketing was quickly cleared. From the business perspective, new product extensions to the product line portfolio could now be treated as commodity investments rather than high-stakes investments.

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