Identifying future growth engines

Challenge

A software and services company operated in a market which had, after years of steady double-digit growth, started to show first signs of saturation. The leadership team needed to get a granular understanding on the detailed market profit pools, their software products’ lifecycle stages and products’ competitiveness to understand where to focus the investments for the upcoming years.

Brave the future

Our team started by assessing the Nordic market sizes for the different software offerings, covering addressable potential, future outlook and competitive landscape. It soon became clear that the future growth would need to come from a set of specific software markets as they had enough room for substantial growth.

In the next phase, the technological performance of each software product was analysed in detail to understand whether the product was in a winning position in the selected markets. The assessment covered product’s development process, feature set, UX and underlying technology – furthermore, these were partly benchmarked against the competition.

With the combination of market and software product evaluation the leadership team was able to carry out fact-based decisions on which markets to enter, what kind of gaps needed to be addressed, and how large investments were required to increase the competitiveness of the selected growth engines.

Impact

The organization received a clear roadmap prioritizing the development of each of the growth engines. Moreover, it was also concluded that the headroom for future growth was becoming limited even in the prioritized offering markets, implying that supportive revenue sources, such as new value adding services with 3^rd parties, were required to keep the growth trajectory on its course.