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Product Management Consulting Services & Expertise
We are deeply experienced product experts who understand your challenges, deliver practical guidance, and help you innovate, scale, and build world-class product teams.
“We’re making better decisions, faster.”
— Apple Executive
“John has that rare combination of brilliance and pragmatism that truly sets him apart. John is world class.”
— Dan Keller, HP Executive
“John was able to come in to a complex assignment and teach both the art and science of project leadership. Seek him out.”
— Todd Tomba, Roche R&D Executive
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Product Management Consulting
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Clients We’ve Helped
Results From Previous Engagements
- Grew year-over-year revenue by 33%
- Increased profit margin by 20%
- Reduced time to marked by 55%
- Scaled development capacity by 4x
We Can Help You
- Accelerate innovation and break free of derivative products
- Create a differentiated product strategy that propels your product vision forward
- Enhance product portfolio management and efficiently execute product roadmaps
- Optimize your product discovery and streamline development processes
Accelerate Innovation
You’re building ambitious, new-to-the-world products, and getting the voice of the customer & other stakeholders is a challenging requirement to success. We help companies establish innovation methodologies such as Design Thinking & Kano Analysis.
Develop a Product Mindset
We help our clients excel in stakeholder delight with a product mindset, focusing on creating customer value (for all stakeholders) above all. With a product mindset, you deliver value faster and in increments to exceed customer needs.
Build Breakthrough Products
As consultants, we help our clients leverage Design Thinking, R&D, development frameworks, and even M&A to help you deliver your product vision. We have processes that help your teams gain quantitative and qualitative insights required to produce game-changing, successful products.
Improve Organizational Effectiveness
Beyond the product manager (and product owner, or product leader), we help you improve skill sets & clarify roles and responsibilities to improve how your teams work together. We help you speed up decision making in order to speed products to market by increasing targeted capabilities.
Product Management Consulting Case Studies
Apple Consulting Engagement
TCGen founder John Carter designed and implemented the Apple New Product Process (ANPP), a process used throughout Apple’s product divisions that enabled them to scale rapidly enabling a startup culture to productively flourish. The process is used in all divisons. One of their executives in the product organization said “We are making better decisions, faster.”
HP Consulting Engagement
We worked with general management marketing and engineering to understand gaps in product management and how to fill them. We helped management to better fund the product marketing team and increase the number of dedicated resources to each of these teams. The result was a positive impact in customer satisfaction and increased predictability.
Bio-Rad Consulting Engagement
TCGen worked with an Agile product team to design the next generation platform of diagnostic testing systems for this healthcare company. We implemented a unique customer visitation plan to develop our user stories. The results: a platform launch that was the most successful ever for Bio-Rad and has been an enduring winner for them over many years.
BOSE (Chief Engineer)
John managed the development of products such as the BOSE® Noise-Canceling Headphones (sharing the original patent with Dr. Bose), and Wave® Music System enjoyed by millions of customers world-wide. The innovative headphones (new to the world technology) set the gold standard even for today for noise canceling. During this time he learned how to innovate and execute at the same time.
Why We Are Different
From Other Product Management Consulting Firms
We Listen
TCGen’s approach differs from the others because we listen. We drive deeply into the culture and challenges of the organization including in management and the development teams, as well as product management. We use our communication skills and product competencies to deeply understand the needs of our customers (CPOs, CTOs and executive management teams).
We Give You Access To Proprietary Tools
We bring a collection of proprietary tools and models, and we help you implement them during our product management consulting engagements as part of our deliverables. We perform the project management of our initiatives, in close collaboration with your team (not separately), so there’s shared learning in building great products.
We have a robust set of templates, OKRs, KPIs, innovation frameworks, and templates to enable you to get up and running fast.
We Bring Industry-Leading Expertise
We are deeply experienced product management and product development experts, recognized as leaders in product development and bringing C Level experience (Chief Product Officer, Chief Technical Officer, Head of Product/VP of Product) to your team. You’ll work directly with someone with deep, first-hand knowledge of building software products enjoyed by millions of people—we won’t hand you off to a recent MBA.
Our team is battle tested with years of experience building products, and comes from tech companies with specific product capabilities in user research, user experience (UX/UI), product design, product market fit, lifecycle management, pricing, and technical product / digital product development.
We Deliver Inch-Wide, Mile-Deep Change
Too many consultants complicate processes to no end, or turn all engagements into a big Digital Transformation, or worst yet, go an inch deep, and a mile wide – turning the engagement into a process swamp. We’ll help you implement only the approaches that make a difference.
How TCGen Works
Although each engagement is unique, most include 3 elements:
The overall process often looks something like this:
- We begin with a thorough assessment of your organization’s capability, and identify gaps.
- We agree on goals and KPIs to improve in product management.
- We identify a small number of the most effective levers of improvement.
- We associate each of these product management levers with a metric.
- We pair up with a senior level individual contributor on your team part-time to ensure changes stick.
- We review progress, including your team members, and recommend actions you should take.
We are deeply experienced product experts who understand your challenges, deliver practical guidance, and help you innovate, scale, and build world-class product teams.
John Carter
Principal, TCGen Inc.
John Carter is a widely respected expert on product development and product management. He is the co-inventor of Bose’s Noise Canceling Headphones and designer of Apple’s New Product Process (ANPP).
As Founder of TCGen Inc., he has consulted for Abbott, Amazon, Apple, Cisco, HP, IBM, Mozilla, Roche, 3M and many other organizations.
He is the author of “Innovate Products Faster,” a handbook for accelerating product development. He currently serves on the Cirrus Logic board of directors. John has a MS in electrical engineering from MIT.