A useful industrial digital product starts from a buyer or operational problem worth solving.
We set industrial digital product strategy for catalogues, portals, product selectors, document libraries and complex content platforms, connecting user needs, commercial value, product data, source systems and delivery constraints before a large build is committed.
Industrial estates accumulate. A corporate site, a legacy product microsite, two country sites built by local agencies, a distributor extranet and a careers page inherited from an acquisition. The strategy work is deciding, with evidence, which of those to invest in, which to merge, which to retire, and what the next three years of the portfolio and the buying journey will require.
Industrial companies rarely lack digital properties. What they lack is an evidenced reason to keep half of them. An industrial digital product strategy engagement exists to answer, with data rather than opinion, what should be built, what should be merged and what should be closed.
That means looking at traffic and enquiry quality by property, at the cost of maintaining each one including internal time, at what the sales organisation and the distributor network are asking for, and at which parts of the buying journey, specification, comparison, quotation, reordering and after-sales support, are currently unsupported.
An audit of the current digital estate, a prioritised roadmap, business cases for the initiatives worth funding, and a sequencing recommendation matched to what your team and budget can deliver in a year rather than in an ideal one.
Where the roadmap depends on product data, and in industrial projects it usually does, we include an assessment of where that data lives today, what state it is in, and what has to change in the PIM or ERP before a configurator, a filtered catalogue or a distributor portal can be built on top of it.
The engagement finishes with a roadmap scoped to be delivered, by us or by whoever you choose, with each initiative carrying its rationale, its dependencies and an indicative effort. That is a document a delivery team can start from and a finance director can interrogate.
We also document the reasoning behind each priority call. When the sequence is questioned two quarters later, and it will be, the answer is on record rather than reconstructed from memory.
Code Industrial is the industrial B2B practice of Code Barcelona, an agency building corporate websites and digital platforms since 2015. The same strategy, design and engineering team works on every industrial project, from the first scoping session through to life after launch.
The trigger differs by company. Industrial digital product strategy starts with the business question that needs answering.
What comes up before commissioning a strategy engagement.
No. The roadmap is scoped to be delivered by whoever the client chooses, including another agency or an internal team, and it is written so that a third party can price it. Where the recommendation is to reduce rather than expand, or to buy a product rather than build one, we say so. A roadmap that only ever points at our own services is worth less to you and, in the end, to us.
It scales with the estate under review. A single-market manufacturer with two properties is a much shorter engagement than a group with affiliates across a dozen countries, several acquired brands and a product catalogue spread over three systems. We scope the timeline against the number of properties, markets, stakeholders and source systems involved rather than applying a fixed template, and we say at the outset which of those will take longest.
For a digital roadmap specifically, generally yes: audit, prioritisation, business cases and sequencing are what this engagement produces. For broader commercial or organisational strategy that happens to touch digital, such as channel conflict between direct sales and the distributor network, a specialist consultancy is likely the better fit, and we would say so rather than stretching the engagement beyond what it should cover.
Then that is the recommendation, and we set out how to do it safely: redirect mapping so the accumulated search visibility transfers, an archive of the content worth keeping, and a plan for the audiences that used the property. Retiring a site that costs more to maintain than it returns is frequently the highest-value outcome of this work, even though it is the one stakeholders find hardest to hear.
By measuring what can be measured and being explicit about what cannot. In industrial B2B, an enquiry may convert eighteen months later, so a case built on last-click revenue misleads. We work with qualified enquiry volume and quality, cost per qualified enquiry, distributor self-service rates, reduction in internal handling time, and the value of removing a manual step, and we state the assumptions rather than hiding them inside a single figure.
It depends on how much differs by market in substance: product availability, certification, pricing model, distributor structure and language. Where the differences are content-level, one platform with market and language layers is usually cheaper to run and stronger in search than separate sites. Where a market has a distinct portfolio or a separate legal entity selling different goods, a separate property can be justified. We test that against your actual catalogue rather than a general rule.
Marketing and digital, commercial or sales leadership, IT or whoever owns the ERP and PIM, and at least one person from the country organisations if the estate is international. Product management is worth including where a catalogue or configurator is in scope. The engagement works best with a single internal sponsor who can decide, and a short list of interviews rather than a large standing committee.
Strategy work usually leads into scoping and then a build. These are the services the roadmap tends to point at.
A budget without agreed priorities, an estate that has grown without a plan, or a digital initiative that needs a decision. Tell us the situation and we will set out how we would approach the industrial digital product strategy.