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The Third Growth Option with Benno Duenkelsbuehler and Guests
Welcome to The Third Growth Option, where we're not just talking about growth—we're making it our mission.
At TGO, we understand that success isn't a fixed destination; it's an ongoing journey with twists, turns, and unexpected detours that take us to new places. Those moments are our Third Growth Options, where we throw away binary choices to create our own path.
Hosted by Benno Duenkelsbuehler, O.G #GrowthNerd, we're on a mission to redefine success inside and outside of business, one episode at a time. From humble beginnings to Fortune 500 companies, our stories are not just about business—it's about the relentless pursuit of greatness in every aspect of life.
With each episode, we don’t just want to share insights—we want to empower business owners across all frontiers to carve their own path to success, their way.
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The Third Growth Option with Benno Duenkelsbuehler and Guests
Product Design & Product Management - Building Blocks
Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ?
Inspired by Cincinnati’s historic Findlay Market, I pulled together three simple but powerful tools that help any leader (not just product managers) contribute to product strategy. These frameworks create a shared language that makes cross-functional collaboration easier across sales, finance, ops, and product.
• Two-by-Two Matrix → Map your assortment across basic vs. seasonal and core vs. fashion to see risk distribution at a glance
• Product Development Calendars → Gantt-style visuals show overlapping processes so bottlenecks don’t sneak up on you
• Scatter Graphs → Plot products to spot market gaps, competitive positions, and balance in your portfolio
When leaders have the right visual frameworks, silos break down, conversations flow, and assortment decisions become smarter.
Always growing.
Benno Duenkelsbuehler
CEO & Chief Sherpa of (re)ALIGN
Hey, we're outside Findlay Market. You can see it over there. I'm going to close it up here because it is too dang hot out there. Findlay's Market in Cincinnati is one of those institutions, 100 plus years old that you can find all kinds of awesome, excellent food, and it reminds me of this episode that I wanted to do as part of the Growth Climbers Toolbox around product management, product tools. Obviously, a super important part of growing your business is to get the product right and if you're a general manager that has grown up not through the product side of the business but through finance or operations or sales, talking about product can be complex, right, because there is left brain, right brain, analytical, creative stuff going on to get the product right. So there are three tools that I'm using, that I've been using that I just wanted to share with you guys because I think they're super helpful.
Speaker 1:One is a simple two over two matrix. I like the one here, set up as the left column is basic, everyday, the right column is seasonal, you know, holiday or spring, seasonal product. The bottom row is basic core, without a fashion element. The top row is with a fashion element, so obviously the most risky is the upper right-hand corner where it's all fashion, all seasonal. The safest is the bottom left. But you just want to sort of plot your assortment along each of these four quadrants to see if you have it distributed in the way you want it to be distributed. Do you want to be more fashion forward? Do you want to be less seasonal? That's one.
Speaker 1:Number two product development calendars. Most companies work with product development calendars. Many companies work with well, I've seen all kinds of formats Super detailed, not detailed enough and everything in between. I really think that a Gantt chart, whether that's 12 columns for the 12 months or 52 columns by week, a Gantt chart that has columns is the time rows are the beginning, middle and end of a process. That could be the product development process. That could be the marketing collateral catalog website production process. That could be the inventory management process. And oftentimes I like to see you know the various processes laid. I like to see the side by side or one on top of the other, so I can see where is their crossover and bottlenecks coming up Right. Whereas they're crossover and bottlenecks coming up right, you can. Some companies have different product development calendars for different collections, for different categories. So that's a super helpful tool and if you do it at the right sort of level of altitude and detail, it can be helpful to non-product folks as well, right On the operation side, on the finance side, on the sales side.
Speaker 1:And the third one is just a scatter graph, scatter plot, where you pick the X and the Y axle values, however you want, into why Axel values however you want. I, like you know, seeing low price to high price could be one Axel. Traditional versus fashion forward could be another Axel to look at. You can do a scatterplot for your overall company and put your competitors on that and see where there might be gaps in the market. You could put, if you have, say, 10 collections or 10 categories of products, put them on the scatterplot and see where are you, left to right, top to bottom, where you want to be. Are there holes, are there gaps, are there opportunities? So those are three things, three tools that I think are super helpful to all cross-functionally, to all parts of the leadership team, not just the product team, so that it fosters collaboration amongst the different silos and helps you build a better assortment with more collaboration, more input from people outside the product department.
