Product People Secured £530k for Maritime Product Innovation

The Client: A Maritime Software Leader

A global maritime software provider delivering navigation, compliance, safety, and environmental solutions to shipowners and fleet operators. Its product portfolio spans onboard and shoreside tools, including training, compliance, voyage planning, fleet performance, and technical management.

As the portfolio expanded, product strategy and roadmap planning varied across teams. The client recognized an opportunity to strengthen competitive positioning, prioritization logic, and long-term investment sequencing across the portfolio.

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The Mission: Learning & Assessment

Product People supported the client during a mission that spanned two distinct mandates.

We began by scoping and validating three new product bets, including securing GBP 530k in initial investment for a digital maritime compliance recordkeeping product and unlocking a new revenue stream through a certificate verification opportunity.

When two maritime software organizations merged mid-mission, we shifted from product incubation to rationalizing the combined portfolio across six product lines. Product People equipped the newly merged business with competitive and strategic frameworks to support more confident investment decisions.

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Our Main Quest: From Product Discovery to Portfolio Clarity

Launch: Onboarded Quickly

From day one, Product People embedded into the client’s complex multi-product environment, spanning navigation, compliance, training, and fleet performance. We established ways of working, aligned with VP and CPO stakeholders, and built context across active product lines within the first weeks of the engagement.

Explore & Conquer

With the lay of the land established, the mission divided into two clear acts: first, scoping and validating new product opportunities across three sequential bets; then, when two maritime software organizations merged mid-mission, pivoting to rationalize the combined portfolio. What began as product incubation became portfolio strategy.

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Initiatives

Initiative 1 — New Product Opportunities: Scoping, Validating, and Securing Investment

Working across three sequential product bets, Product People built structure for each opportunity, moving from customer feedback synthesis to business cases, investment gates, and approvals.

Human Capital Management: From Customer Feedback to Portfolio Clarity

Opportunity:

The client needed to determine which workforce management modules to migrate from legacy systems to its platform. The client recognized an opportunity to create a more structured view of customer needs, prioritization, and technical feasibility before deciding whether to invest further.

What we did:

• Synthesized and bucketed customer feedback to identify industry-standard workforce management modules across the client’s product stream
• Prioritized modules using an impact/effort assessment against Jobs-to-Be-Done
• Concluded that the migration was not technically feasible and was not worth pursuing without first rationalizing the full product portfolio
• Surfaced the need for broader portfolio rationalization before additional migration investment
• Delivered a product brief and Definition of Ready/Done deck to align the team on the recommendation

Digital Maritime Compliance Records: Secured GBP 530k in Initial Investment

Opportunity:

Maritime vessels still relied on paper-based record books, including oil, garbage, and ballast water record books, for regulatory compliance. Digitalization was a recognized opportunity, and the client needed a validated business case, defined product scope, and investment decision to proceed.

What we did:

• Reviewed incubation materials, an existing prototype, and stakeholder input to define scope and commercialization strategy
• Validated market size assumptions and sell price per vessel using Strategy team data
• De-risked the investment by defining minimum product scopes to drive the customer outcomes needed to support willingness to pay
• Built three business cases, a build vs. buy vs. partner assessment, and a lean canvas
• Secured GBP 530k in initial investment and approval for execution at the first investment gate

Maritime Certificate Verification: Pursued a New Revenue Stream

Opportunity:

A maritime certificate verification platform covered 1.8M+ seafarer credentials and had strong commercial potential. The monetization approach needed to account for adoption risk among flag states and unions, as well as data governance complexity between the platform entity and the client as a for-profit partner.

What we did:

• Started from a blank slate, exploring directions based on existing unmet customer needs, estimated serviceable market, and willingness to pay
• Defined 5 distinct business models the company could pursue
• Shortlisted 3 product solutions and applied a lightweight risk and impact/effort assessment to identify the most viable option
• Selected a modular interface for certificate issuers to interact with the verification network, connecting to the client’s product lines
• Created a detailed product brief, prototypes, and pitch deck
• Secured approval to pursue the investment, with formal approval pending the sister product’s proof-of-concept stage

Initiative 2 — From Fragmented Portfolio to Structured Investment Direction

Opportunity:

After the merger, the client had an opportunity to bring more consistency to investment decisions across the post-merger product portfolio. Competitive knowledge existed across product managers but was inconsistent and not structured for comparison. Customer needs were documented but not quantified for roadmap prioritization. Each product evaluated competitors differently, making it difficult to understand where the client truly differentiated and where it was meeting table-stakes expectations across the portfolio.

What we did:

• Introduced the Portfolio Rationalization Methodology, a 6-step framework:
  • Calculate net present value per product
  • Stack-rank by net present value
  • Complete strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis
  • Create opportunity-threat matrices
  • Re-stack-rank by quadrant positioning
  • Allocate resources to highest-priority products within the annual budget
• Designed and implemented a standardized Competitive Intelligence framework across core products, including:
  • Customer needs mapping
  • Porter’s Five Forces
  • Feature comparison across table-stakes and differentiating capabilities
  • 4 Corners strategic analysis
• Introduced a consistent definition of table-stakes vs. differentiating capabilities, clarifying whether a feature represented market parity or defensible advantage
• Anchored outputs in portfolio rationalization decks and internal product documentation, supplementing with external competitor materials where necessary
• Consolidated outputs into structured decks shared with respective product managers to validate assumptions and reduce blind spots
• Built a Fit-Gap Analysis model mapping:
  • Market needs
  • Current fit status
  • Identified gaps
  • Recommendations
  • Impact scores based on customer value, compliance exposure, and competitive pressure
  • Effort scores based on engineering capacity planning and investment
• Sequenced recommendations by impact/effort ratio, converting qualitative opportunities into scored initiatives with implied engineering months
• Applied the combined competitive intelligence and fit-gap model across core products, shifting conversations from what felt important to what could yield the highest return per engineering month

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Mini-Missions: Our Side Quests

Alongside the two main initiatives, Product People delivered two tactical outputs that directly supported the client’s commercial and leadership decision-making:

• Accelerated Business Cases: Developed a board-level revenue impact model projecting £50M+ revenue uplift by 2030 across pessimistic, base, and stretch scenarios, enabling leadership to evaluate the combined commercial case for post-merger synergies with a single, presentation-ready artifact.
• Supplementary Roadmap for Sales: Translated fit-gap scored outputs into a supplementary multi-year roadmap built specifically to equip the sales team. Sequenced strictly by impact/effort score, the roadmap surfaced high-return foundational capabilities early, phased complex structural initiatives logically, and created a comparative view across products. This enabled Sales to clearly articulate which products were ready for differentiation investment vs. foundational correction, and where the fastest competitive lift would land for prospective customers.

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Mission Achievements: Delivered Outcomes

📚 Secured GBP 530k in initial investment for a digital maritime compliance recordkeeping product by validating the business case for replacing paper-based regulatory record books across vessel fleets.

💡 Secured approval to pursue a new revenue stream by evaluating 5 monetization models for a maritime certificate verification network covering 1.8M+ seafarer credentials and identifying a modular interface as the most viable path forward.

🦄 Delivered a Portfolio Rationalization framework across 6 core products, underpinned by standardized competitive intelligence, customer needs mapping, Porter’s Five Forces, 4 Corners analysis, table-stakes vs. differentiators, and a quantified fit-gap scoring model. This enabled leadership to sequence roadmap investment by return per engineering month rather than intuition.

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