On the other hand, to establish a separate business unit to work on the core assets but be divorced from working on individual products carries the danger that this unit will produce assets that emphasize beauty and elegance over practicality and utility. In either case, producing and managing the reusable assets means establishing processes to make the assets satisfy the needs of all of the business units that use them. This is a crucial role that requires staff skilled in abstraction, design, negotiation, and creative problem solving. The question of funding the core asset development is crucial. Customer Management Customer management becomes an important product-line function.
Customers interact with a product-line organization in a different way.
Marketers can no longer agree to anything customers want but must instead nudge customers to set their requirements so that they can be fulfilled by a version of the product line within the planned scope of variation. Contrary to intuition, this often makes the customer much happier than before. Under the new paradigm, the marketer can point to specific requirements that would put the customer's new system outside the scope of the product line, which would increase the cost and delivery time, lower the system's reliability, and keep that customer out of a community of customers to which the vendor pays a lot of attention. If not, the customer can still order a system to satisfy particular requirements but with a better idea of where the risks may be hiding. The customer community should not be underestimated.