The calendar the customer can actually commit to
A commercial proposition often borrows its time horizon from the equipment it contains. That can be a sensible starting point for the supplier’s planning, but it does not establish the period over which the customer can commit to the location where the equipment will be used. I have learned to ask about both calendars before treating a long service arrangement as a common product. The mismatch may be negotiable in an individual case. When it recurs across the intended audience, however, it deserves attention in product development rather than being handed to commercial teams as a succession of awkward exceptions.
Our fictional 2018 review concerned a proposed twelve-year fixed-asset energy-service arrangement. Eighteen customer situations were under discussion. Nine involved building leases shorter than seven years, six involved longer terms and three involved owned premises. These categories did not tell us everything about the customers or their future plans. They did tell us that half the group could not simply be assumed to control the same location for the proposed service period. The product account needed to take that limitation seriously before describing a uniform long-term proposition as an obvious fit for the entire audience.
Why negotiation is not always a design answer
Mara Vellensby preferred to keep the core arrangement intact and let commercial colleagues address the differences. Her reasoning reflected a real cost: changing the product would require development before we knew how much demand the alternative might produce. A single family was easier to explain and support. I did not dismiss that concern. I questioned whether we were protecting useful simplicity or preserving a supplier assumption that a substantial part of the audience would have to work around. A repeated premises constraint was evidence about the product’s intended setting, not merely evidence that some customers needed more persuasive negotiation.
What a portable pilot can and cannot establish
We chose C$8.6 million development and four portable-service pilots. The purpose was to investigate another configuration and service account for a shorter-horizon situation. Portability was not a magic answer. Equipment movement can require practical preparation, technical assessment and contractual agreement. There can be circumstances in which moving a unit is possible but still unattractive, or in which a customer’s plans change in ways the initial proposition cannot accommodate. A serious pilot needs room to expose those limitations. If the proposed alternative is treated as successful before they are examined, the pilot becomes a demonstration arranged to protect its own premise.
The four pilots therefore describe a stage of work, not a recommendation to every customer with a short lease. They do not establish a universal cost advantage, a financing treatment or eligibility for a particular agreement. I want those boundaries stated because commercial product stories can easily convert a useful design experiment into a broad claim about what buyers should do. My decision concerned what the product organisation should investigate. The appropriate specialists and the customer would still have to assess an actual arrangement. Keeping that distinction does not diminish the experiment; it makes its intended contribution more credible.
There was a genuine sacrifice in the choice. A portable route required another development account and a more varied explanation. We could no longer present all eighteen situations as uncomplicated candidates for the original twelve-year family. Some of the apparent opportunity became less tidy in the planning paper. But the alternative was to retain that tidy picture by leaving the customer’s tenure outside it. I would rather expose the complexity where it changes the product decision than allow it to reappear later as a surprise in each proposed agreement. The work does not become simpler merely because it has moved to another team.
The premises question also changes how I listen to customer requests. A request for flexibility may be described as a preference when it is rooted in a constraint the customer cannot remove. Equally, a customer may prefer a shorter commitment for reasons that a portable configuration does not solve. Product research needs to distinguish those situations without deciding in advance that every expression of flexibility points towards the same feature. The useful question is what the customer needs to remain able to decide, and why. That can lead to a different service structure, a different audience or a decision that the proposed product is not suitable.
I also resist treating the three owner-occupied locations as automatically straightforward. Ownership tells us something about the premises relationship, but it does not supply every commercial or operational answer. A company may reconsider its production footprint, face other investment priorities or require conditions that the standard arrangement does not address. Categories help organise inquiry; they do not finish it. The eighteen situations were a way to make a recurring mismatch visible, not a classification system that could approve a customer without further work. The product account should carry that modest but useful purpose rather than pretend to be a complete decision rule.
For portfolio leadership, this creates an important connection between product architecture and the quality of commercial decisions. A family designed around one premises horizon may be entirely appropriate for a defined group. The difficulty arises when its scope expands in the narrative without a corresponding examination of the customer conditions. Senior leaders should be able to ask where the standard fits, where a variant is being investigated and where the opportunity remains outside the current offer. Those distinctions let the business allocate development expense and commercial attention deliberately instead of relying on individual negotiations to reveal the true product boundaries after the fact.
The lesson I take from the portable-service work is not that shorter commitments are always better. It is that the product’s calendar and the customer’s calendar deserve equal standing in the design conversation. The supplier can describe an intended equipment life, but it cannot grant the customer years of control over a location that the customer does not possess. A useful proposition starts from the circumstances within which a commitment can actually be considered. Sometimes that supports a long fixed arrangement; sometimes it justifies a bounded experiment with another approach. The product leader’s task is to make the difference examinable before the commercial label makes it look as though the choice has already been made.