Introduction
For most of my career, I viewed industrial companies through an engineering lens.
Like many people working in product development, PLM, configuration management and engineering IT, that perspective felt natural.
When product development struggled, I looked at engineering processes. When information became difficult to manage, I looked at PLM. When complexity increased, I looked at product structures and configuration management. When transformation initiatives failed to deliver the expected results, I often looked at technology.
Over time, however, I started noticing something that did not quite fit.
Many of the most expensive business problems I encountered were not actually located where they first appeared.
A sales problem could originate in product definition. A service issue could originate in engineering. A manufacturing challenge could be traced back to configuration decisions made years earlier. And what appeared to be a technology problem was often something else entirely.
The more I observed this pattern, the more interested I became in a simple question:
What if the real challenge is not inside our functions, systems or departments? What if it exists between them?
The Transformation Paradox
Industrial companies have never invested more heavily in digital transformation.
PLM programs. ERP modernization. CPQ initiatives. Data platforms. Digital twins. Cloud migrations. AI projects.
The ambition is almost always the same:
- Improve productivity
- Reduce complexity
- Increase speed
- Improve customer value
- Strengthen competitiveness
Most of these initiatives are launched for valid reasons. Many are implemented successfully. New capabilities are introduced. Old systems are replaced. Processes are standardized. Information becomes more accessible.
Yet despite decades of investment, many organizations continue to face remarkably similar challenges.
Engineering struggles to keep up with growing complexity. Sales struggles to configure the right solution. Service struggles to access the right information. Management struggles to determine where the next investment should be made.
This raises an uncomfortable question. How is it possible for so many parts of the organization to improve, while the overall business still feels harder to operate than it should?
The Way We Think About Companies
Most organizations are structured around functions: engineering, sales, manufacturing, service, operations and IT.
There are good reasons for this. Large businesses require specialization. Expertise matters. Ownership matters. Accountability matters.
But there is a hidden consequence.
The company is organized around functions. The customer experiences a lifecycle.
A customer does not experience engineering. A customer does not experience PLM. A customer does not experience manufacturing. A customer experiences an outcome.
And that outcome depends on how effectively knowledge, information and decisions move across the entire business. Not through a single department. Through all of them.
Where Value Is Actually Created
Consider a simplified product lifecycle.
A market need becomes a requirement. A requirement becomes an engineering decision. An engineering decision becomes a product. That product becomes a commercial offering. The offering becomes a customer order. The order becomes a manufactured product. The product enters operation. The customer gains experience. The organization gains knowledge. And eventually that knowledge should influence the next generation product.
Customers experience this as a single journey. Organizations typically manage it as a collection of separate responsibilities.
That distinction may seem subtle. In practice, it changes everything.
Because competitive advantage is rarely created inside a single activity. It is created by how effectively the entire flow works together.
When Good Organizations Produce Poor Outcomes
This is where things become interesting.
Every function may perform reasonably well. And the business can still underperform.
Engineering may create technically excellent products. Sales may achieve ambitious targets. Manufacturing may operate efficiently. Service may support customers successfully. Yet the organization still struggles.
Why? Because the handoffs between them become increasingly important.
Information loses context. Knowledge becomes fragmented. Decisions become disconnected. Ownership becomes unclear.
The result is rarely a dramatic failure. More often, it appears as friction: small delays, repeated misunderstandings, manual workarounds, inconsistent decisions and local optimizations.
Individually these issues seem insignificant. Collectively they become expensive.
The Product Lifecycle Gap
Over the years I have started thinking about this as the Product Lifecycle Gap.
The gap appears whenever information, knowledge or accountability fail to move effectively through the lifecycle.
- Engineering creates products that are difficult to configure and sell.
- Sales commits to solutions that are difficult to deliver.
- Service discovers recurring problems that never influence future designs.
- Customer experience remains disconnected from product development.
- Leadership struggles to see where investments will create the greatest business impact.
Notice something important. None of these examples are necessarily technology failures.
The systems may work exactly as intended. The departments may perform exactly as expected. Yet the business still loses value.
The gap exists in the spaces between them. And that makes it surprisingly difficult to see.
The Cost of Looking Locally
When performance problems emerge, organizations naturally look for local explanations.
Engineering sees engineering challenges. Sales sees commercial challenges. Service sees service challenges. IT sees technology challenges.
All of those observations may be correct. The problem is that they rarely explain the whole picture.
Many of the most expensive business constraints emerge across organizational boundaries. They emerge where information moves from one function to another, where decisions change ownership and where lifecycle knowledge is supposed to flow.
Unfortunately, these are often the areas that receive the least attention. They are harder to measure, harder to own and harder to justify in a business case.
So organizations frequently optimize visible components while invisible constraints continue to grow.
A Different Question
What if we approached transformation differently?
What if we started by understanding where value is lost across the lifecycle rather than identifying the next system to replace?
Instead of asking, "Which technology should we invest in?" perhaps we should first ask, "Where in the lifecycle are we failing to create value?"
Those questions sound similar. They are not.
One starts with solutions. The other starts with understanding. One leads us toward systems. The other leads us toward outcomes.
Final Thoughts
The longer I have worked with product development, PLM, configuration management, engineering IT and transformation, the less convinced I have become that most organizations suffer from a technology problem.
Many have excellent technologies. Many employ highly capable people. Many run large transformation programs. Yet they continue to struggle with the same underlying challenge: understanding how value is created across the product lifecycle.
Because customers never experience departments. They experience outcomes.
And when those outcomes disappoint, the cause is often not found inside a specific function. It is found between them.
That is what I call the Product Lifecycle Gap.
And before we decide how to transform the business, we first need to understand why that gap exists at all.