Product Strategy and Corporate Success

Book excerpt: Product strategy is the key driver of business strategy and corporate success. This book brings out several important aspects of product strategy, drawing upon examples from the Indian automobile industry, which is verily the bellwether of the Indian economy. The automobile industry is not only a strategic industry economically but also an instructive industry intellectually. The industry is the cradle of modern management and is a synthesis of various functional strategies. The growth of the automobile industry or, for that matter, any consumer-facing industry lies in its ability to maintain a continuous pipeline of new and innovative products, substantive in functionality and stylistic in appearance. The automobile industry provides the perfect backdrop for discussing products as the core of the corporate business strategy. The global automobile industry, including the Indian automobile industry, is at an inflection point with portends of an unprecedented transformation. The drivers of this transformation are already seen in terms of connected vehicles, autonomous mobility, electric vehicles and digital technologies. The book, through its eighty chapters, demonstrates the synergistic interplay between technology and business, strategy and execution, innovation and inventiveness, enterprise and regulation, indigenization and globalization, structure and process, resourcing and spend, and leadership and management. This interplay would determine India’s ability to become a major player in this transformation. This book will be of interest to industry professionals, policy makers, the academic community and the general public.