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How we get connected right

When connected products fail, it's rarely because they were bad. Most die because they become unsustainable.

Sustainable connected product development is about fitting your expenditures to your program's present need and future potential. Whether we activate, deliver, streamline, or change your connected product program, we always understand, center, trim, enhance, and prepare:

  1. Understand. What’s your complete product experience? Intended and actual. Context is king.
  2. Center. What's present and working? Sustainability requires a solid foundation.
  3. Trim. What's present that doesn't work? Gaps may exist in your product or process.
  4. Enhance. What's absent that would help now? Create an immediate incremental impact.
  5. Prepare. What's next that's worth preparing for? Products 1 and n may not be similar.

Our consulting amplifies continuous progress by:

  • Creating inflection points—beacons of clarity that teams can target or pivot around.
  • Coaching your leaders into connected product experts.

Next Mile ensures your repeat, sustainable success with connected product development.

Digital sustainability is within reach

We average 3–10x savings over legacy approaches.

Let’s go

Hard-won lessons

More than any other cost type, change cost has a multiplicative effect in connected product development. In this domain, it pays to be cautious:

  1. Keep what works. And build upon it. Throwing out good teams, practices, and tools has enormous consequences.
  2. Plan and estimate thoroughly. The hidden dependencies behind a large change can create so much rework that it's cheaper to build something new instead!
  3. Symptoms ≠ causes. Underperformance manifests as a financial or team stress, but often has an indirect upstream or downstream cause. Common culprits include release management, sensing/data usage mismatches, UX/use case misalignment, and low-usage software features.
  4. Enablers de-stress development. Frequently, we find the lightweight application of support expertise like QA, UX, or BA has a rapid, positive impact on an in-flight project.
  5. 0→1, 1→2, 2→n. Your first, second, and nth connected product development efforts will require different things from your organization.

Our promise



Connected products are core offerings—your expertise—so Next Mile works inside and alongside your product development team. We serve:

  1. Senior leaders who need impartial advice to illuminate blind spots and improve program health.
  2. Champions who need connected product acumen to fill gaps and build alignment.
  3. Stuck teams who need a new way forward to escape a cycle of crisis and regain traction.

We provide force-multiplying guidance to help you reach success.

Next Mile delivers:

Responsible counsel

Rational, holistic critical-path advice.

Clean incentive

We’re bound to your best interest, not self-serving technology sales.

Succession

Your staff grow with the program so you’re not left hanging.

Compounding advantage

Incremental improvements snowball into powerful assets.

Fearless proactivity

When better options arise, we’ll show you.

Next Mile avoids:

Ambushes

Unexpected reveals annoy us, too.

Ultimatums

Forced decisions and false choices always build resentment.

Ruts

If things don’t change, we change tack. No billing for nothing.

Open ends

All work requires an intentional end state before we start.

Loose ends

Awful consultants implement magic processes, then bail.

Review our case studies to see how these lessons apply.