Six Moves, One Reshape

January 2013. EWE Tel — the telecommunications arm of EWE, the Northwest German utility group — had two problems wearing the same face.

Outside, their B2B communications portfolio was a mess. Three partner products with overlapping value propositions, where which one you got depended on the preferences of whichever sales or pre-sales manager picked up your lead. Operations had to support all three.

Inside, a failed project with a state client was about to produce a sizable write-off on the licenses and systems EWE Tel had invested in.

I was brought in to fix the portfolio. The write-off question came with the territory.

The three-products problem wasn't really about product choice. It was about what the products were doing to the rest of the company.

Sales picked by preference, so customers got different pitches for functionally identical offers. Operations had to run three product catalogs, three provisioning paths, three support runbooks in parallel. EWE Tel didn't own a category in the market — they resold three competing ones. And the state-project assets had nowhere to live once that project failed.

External problem: EWE Tel didn't have a differentiated product in a category they wanted to compete in.

Internal problem: the organization couldn't have built one if it tried, because sales, operations, and product management were running on three separate tracks, and the inside-sales function was in a different department from customer operations.

This wasn't a product-portfolio engagement. It was a cross-functional engagement wearing a product label.

1. Portfolio consolidation: 3 → 2 → 1. The first decision was to narrow the portfolio. Not to one product immediately — the partner relationships were too politically loaded to cut that fast. Three to two first, then a considered selection down to one. That gave sales, operations, and procurement time to adjust, and gave the chosen partner a clear signal that the relationship would deepen.

2. Partnership structure that absorbed the state-project write-off. The vendor deal was negotiated so that the licenses and systems from the failed state project could be reused in the new platform — or swapped with the vendor for equivalent assets. The write-off disappeared, not through accounting, but through the commercial architecture of the partnership itself. Two problems, one partnership, one resolution.

3. Cloud UC category creation. With the partner chosen, we built a Cloud UC environment for small- and medium-sized companies — not an integration of the existing products, but a new category-level offer that EWE Tel could own and lead on.

4. Customer research discipline: JTBD + personas. Interviews, online surveys, focus groups. What came out of the research: the partner products had too many features, clustered indiscriminately. Meaningful packages — built around Jobs-to-be-Done and identifiable personas — replaced the feature soup. And the personas didn't just shape packaging. They shaped the sales motion too.

5. Organizational redesign: silos → integrated team. Inside sales and customer operations had been separate departments. We combined them into a single team structure — same handoffs, same accountability, same weekly rhythm — because provisioning speed is an organizational output, not a system output.

6. Digital self-service platform: order, manage, operate. Online systems that let customers order the platform, manage their own configuration, and operate the service without going through customer support for routine tasks. Reducing friction at every step of the customer lifecycle, not just at the sale.

1. Cross-functional problems can only be solved by cross-functional interventions at the same time. Fix the product portfolio but leave the silos → cleaner catalog, same provisioning delays. Fix the org but leave three overlapping products → sales still picks by preference. Digitize ordering but leave the packages as feature soup → customers still call support to figure out what they bought.
2. Six moves, one reshape. Any one of the six without the others would have underperformed. All six together unlocked a category, a customer base, and a scale deployment that had all been blocked by the same underlying cross-functional misalignment.
3. Persona work is sales mechanics, not just packaging. The state-bank deal happened because the assistants experienced the product before the IT decision-makers did. Whoever treats personas as a packaging exercise leaves the lever unused. Whoever treats them as sales mechanics has access to the persona that actually decides in the buyer organization — and that is rarely the one who signs on the RFP.