Most companies don’t suffer from a lack of products.
They suffer from too many—and the wrong ones.
Over time, portfolios get bloated with legacy offers, experimental add-ons, and bespoke one-offs for “strategic clients.” And instead of fuelling growth, they dilute it.
At RJP Consulting, we’ve seen how unchecked portfolios create operational drag, confuse sales teams, and erode margin. The biggest issue? No one’s really in charge of cleaning them up.
💣 The Hidden Risks of a Bloated Portfolio
- Too Fat: No One’s Culling the Dead Weight
Most businesses add products far more often than they remove them.
Why? Because killing an offer feels risky—even when it’s not working.
But let’s be clear:
- Products with low/no margin aren’t strategic
- Products that no one can operationally support are liabilities
- Products that don’t align with current market demand shouldn’t be there
Still, they persist. Why?
- Pet projects: Product managers need to justify their existence, and admitting defeat is hard
- Overlapping offers: Multiple products do roughly the same thing, with minor differences and loads of internal politics attached. (Ironically, the car industry does this well—multiple models built on the same base platform.)
- Bespoke-for-one: A legacy deal for a “key customer” that now costs more to service than it brings in
- Fear of churn: Products stay live just because no one wants to rock the boat with a handful of vocal customers—even if the product doesn’t fit the current operating model
If you can’t explain who it’s for, what problem it solves, and why now—it doesn’t belong.
- Too Slow: Delivery Can’t Keep Up
Complex portfolios slow everything down:
- Sales cycles stretch while reps try to explain unclear offers
- Delivery teams build workarounds to fulfil odd combinations
- Ops teams drown in exceptions, approvals, and custom terms
Each new product adds operational overhead. You need new processes, new training, new billing codes, new service terms.
According to Bain & Company, companies with low portfolio complexity grow revenues up to 30% faster and earn margins up to 25% higher than their more complicated peers.
When your product mix exceeds your ability to deliver efficiently, you’re not innovating—you’re suffocating.
- Too Misaligned: What You Offer ≠ What the Market Needs
The market evolves. Most portfolios don’t.
Many firms don’t stop to ask: Does our offer still solve the current problem?
What once made sense may now be:
- Overpriced
- Over-engineered
- Over-reliant on customers or channels that no longer convert
- Misaligned with how customers want to buy today (eg. self-serve, digital, recurring)
Or worse—it’s internally popular but externally irrelevant. The team loves it. The market doesn’t care.
According to Deloitte, over 60% of failed product launches stem from a mismatch between product capabilities and customer needs.
Relevance is not a static achievement. It’s a moving target. And portfolios need to be revalidated regularly.
🧪 Common Portfolio Symptoms
If any of these sound familiar, your portfolio needs work:
- Products with <10% of revenue still get significant internal time
- Sales teams avoid pitching certain products because they “don’t land”
- Your support teams have cheat sheets just to process orders
- Pricing strategies are inconsistent or overly reactive
- Nobody owns the roadmap for simplification
🔧 What to Do About It
✅ Run a product performance audit
Don’t just look at revenue. Look at:
- Margin contribution
- Delivery complexity
- Strategic fit
- Market demand
- Sales traction
- Subscription cost-to-serve, even for dormant or low-usage customers
- Feature overlap: could an alternative be offered instead? Can another product be adapted to serve both needs?
If the product isn’t clearly better than what else exists—or easily rationalised—it’s probably not worth keeping.
✅ Segment the Portfolio
Every product should fall into one of three categories:
- Core: High-margin, high-demand, low-friction. These are the money-makers that customers understand and teams can deliver with confidence. Review quarterly.
- Strategic: Products that serve emerging needs, future positioning, or test grounds. But they require active management, clear KPIs, and an exit plan if they don’t scale.
- Retire: Legacy, underperforming, or low-fit offers. Keep them too long and they’ll drag down your margins, confuse your teams, and erode focus.
Segmenting once isn’t enough. Portfolios need active governance to stay sharp.
✅ Rebuild Around Capability and Customer Value
This is the hard bit—but it’s where competitive advantage is built.
Ask:
- Can we deliver this reliably, at scale, and profitably?
- Does this clearly solve a valuable customer problem today?
- Are our best people focused on this—or is it draining attention?
- Is it distinct from the rest of the portfolio? Does it earn its place?
Also consider:
- Could we consolidate two products into one stronger offer?
- Can customers be migrated to something better and shut the legacy product down?
- Do we have the right support model to service this without operational strain?
Rebuilding doesn’t mean a blank slate. It means ruthless clarity about what earns a place—and what doesn’t.
🚀 How RJP Consulting Helps
We support clients to:
- Run portfolio audits across commercial, delivery, and operations
- Identify product overlaps, gaps, and misfits
- Remove unnecessary complexity from sales and service delivery
- Align go-to-market strategies with high-performing, simplified offers
- Rationalise SKUs and replatform overlapping products
- Build internal frameworks for product lifecycle management and continuous simplification
Bottom Line
You don’t need more products.
You need the right ones—and fewer of them.
Because bloated portfolios don’t just slow you down.
They stop you from scaling.