Context

A $74M privately held global market leader in underground construction technology. Products shipped to 100+ export-controlled countries across 14 regional market groups with 40+ product localizations. Approximately 250 employees, 95% of design, manufacturing, and repair at a single US headquarters.

No product management function. No product operating model. No UX team. No business intelligence. No digital revenue stream. No new flagship product in over a decade. A $40M core replacement program in progress. A 2-year engineering change order backlog. $7M in accumulated technical debt.

I joined as Head of Product on the executive team, reporting directly to the CEO with portfolio P&L authority. The mandate was to ship the $40M program and modernize the portfolio.

Challenge

The $40M program was the mandate I was hired to execute. After gaining access to engineering documentation during a leadership transition, information surfaced that I had not had before. Within two months of gaining full visibility, I diagnosed the program as misaligned with market reality and customer needs.

The question was not “is this program struggling.” The question was “knowing what we know now, would we fund this today.” The answer was no.

The organizational challenge was larger than the technical one. The program had years of investment, executive sponsorship, contracted vendors, and career stakes attached. Recommending its termination required building a structured evaluation methodology, presenting it to the executive committee and ownership, and gaining approval for a fundamental strategic redirect. At a privately held, bootstrapped company with no outside funding or credit lines, every dollar of redirected capital mattered.

Approach

Kill Decision 1: $40M core replacement program. I applied a structured evaluation framework to the program, documented the market misalignment, and built the business case for the executive committee. Ownership approved. Capital redirected to what became the first new flagship product in a decade and the first all-new platform in nearly two decades.

Kill Decision 2: $8M partnership. A secondary program with an external partner was underdelivering against its investment thesis. I terminated the partnership and pivoted to a global partner that offloaded NRE costs and technical risk, saving $400K in pre-production costs.

Kill Decision 3: VR training simulation product line. Aurora Vision, a VR training simulation, had its own development team of seven based in India. I evaluated it on three axes: standalone recurring revenue (failing), measurable pull-through on core product lines (failing), and modernization ROI against the evolving VR technology landscape (negative). All three failed. I killed the product line and reduced the development team. The India office continued operating for sales, repairs, and regional administration.

Digital Revenue Platform. With capital freed from the kills, I built the company’s first cloud-native B2B SaaS platform from scratch on Azure with Stripe payments. Freemium-to-subscription model. Free mobile apps driving paid cloud subscriptions. Digital commerce, subscription management, equipment registration. The company’s first recurring digital revenue stream.

Pricing Architecture Overhaul. End-to-end review of the hardware and software pricing portfolio, resulting in a +5.6% revenue uplift.

Organization Build. I built a 22-person product organization across five departments. Three founded from scratch: UX Design (including a named human-centered design system), Business Intelligence, and Product Operations. I completely reset the existing Product Management function and stood up GTM as a matrixed capability. The product operating model I built remains in place after my departure.

Flagship Launch. The new flagship product line launched at the industry’s largest trade show, unveiled by the company’s second-generation leadership one month after my departure. AI-powered. 8x more frequencies than any competitor. The first new platform built from the ground up in nearly two decades.

Outcome

Three product lines killed. Capital redirected from $48M+ in combined investment to the products that shipped.

Digital subscription revenue grew +137% year-over-year from near-zero after I built the SaaS platform from scratch.

+5.6% revenue uplift from the pricing architecture overhaul across the full hardware and software portfolio.

68% time-to-value reduction (60 minutes to 15 minutes) through UX-driven redesign of the product setup experience.

$6.3M in net-new pipeline generated from the redirected capital.

$15.9M in identified lifecycle cost savings through production data modeling.

22-person product organization. Five departments. Three built from scratch. Product operating model still running.

ECO backlog reduced from 2 years to 2 months by hiring a program manager and guiding remediation.

The flagship product launched across 100+ markets. The product operating model survived the builder.

Lesson

Portfolio turnarounds are not about fixing the roadmap. They are about fixing the business. The kill decisions freed the capital. The org build created the capacity. The digital platform created the revenue. The pricing overhaul optimized the economics. The flagship launch proved the thesis.

The sequence matters. Kill first. Build the team second. Ship third. Optimize fourth. Launching a new product before the organization can sustain it is the most common failure mode in turnarounds. The operating model must exist before the products ship at scale.

The second lesson: the product operating model is the highest-leverage thing a product leader builds. Products have lifecycles. Organizations persist. The model I built is still running. The flagship I shipped will eventually be replaced. The operating model will not.