OVERVIEW

"You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there."

Yogi Berra

"To be defeated is pardonable, to be surprised never!"

Napoleon Bonaparte

Baseball players looking for hits or game-winning home runs aim to contact the ball on the bat's sweet spot. A hit on this spot makes balls sail farther because more of the force of the swing transfers to the ball. Executives looking for home run products for the company portfolio search for the sweet spot too: that figurative juncture where a variety of factors come together to produce favorable conditions for success.

Even the best ballplayers strike out more often than they get hits. In fact, one of the best hitters of all time, Ted Williams, managed a batting percentage over .400 only three years of his career (.406 in 1941, .400 in 1952, and .407 in 1953 with the Red Sox). While this may be an outstanding major league hitting statistic, it is not an acceptable success rate for the product portfolio. A 2005 study by AMR Research indicated that 52 percent of new product introductions resulted in failures. ^[1] Even a 5 out of 10 hit rate isn't acceptable by Wall Street standards. The primary reason for these failures, cited by AMR and confirmed by the PDMA CPAS study cited in Chapter 3, was that products missed customer needs.

Half the time, companies fail to either identify the market sweet spot or to...