Well, I’ll try this analogy. I like to cook, and pulling together a good meal is more than just chucking a few ingredients in a pan.  The perfect meal needs the careful combinations of ingredients, flavours, pots and pans, cooker, timing and, of course, a cook to blend everything together for the optimum results: in short a carefully designed recipe, perhaps tweaked as you follow it, that brings all of these things together to give you the resulting foodie pleasures.

In the same way, a successful business is created and sustained by bringing together every aspect of your business.  I call this the business mix and find this to be a good representation:

By combining the operational and marketing mixes, we can begin to map the interactions between the various ingredients for our successful recipe.  Using this format as a starting point, and populating the business mix to fit your business, you can to collate all of the aspects of your business that impact its results: and that really will be all aspects of your business.

As product managers, or indeed general managers and executives, we need to work across the whole business mix to achieve the sustainable advantage we all want.

So, what should we then do with all of this newly tabulated insight? Well, I find that applying a ranking system to identify those most important, versus those less so, along with competence/capability rating helps.  And mapping a SWOT to the results really can focus the mind, and help you to focus the right resources, on the most important elements of the business mix for your business’ success.