Cummins: Product Advisory Operating Model

The Product Advisory approach linked brand and market signals directly to product priorities, technical needs, and operational readiness. At Cummins, I helped teams put these priorities into daily practice. By clarifying roadmap dependencies, connecting initiatives to clear success criteria, and setting up cross-functional reviews and decision logs, leaders had a practical way to organize important work. Teams across product lines could move forward with more confidence, clear roles, and repeatable steps.

This approach brought product workstreams together. Onboarding, equipment eligibility, fleet monitoring, and product configuration each had their own challenges, and customers needed to move between them smoothly. Because one product decision could affect shared components, another team’s release, or the customer’s next step, the advisory model helped keep these connections clear and manageable.

The Product Eligibility Tool gave the team a clear answer to a common question: which digital products could a customer’s equipment actually support? That answer depended on equipment identifiers, telematics providers, and compatible hardware. Account managers used this clarity to get ready for customer conversations and guide sales, linking equipment compatibility with the products they could offer.

I worked with Cummins product and IT partners to design the tool’s information architecture, user experience, and data requirements. To make the rules easier to review, we started with a spreadsheet that matched the tool’s behavior before building the full application. Early design concepts made choices and results clear, giving product and IT partners something concrete to review and improve before the full build.

The early PrevenTech design vision brought fleet health, equipment details, notifications, and customer support together in one place. As requirements became clearer, we held regular work sessions with product partners to keep teams aligned. These meetings built a shared understanding of priorities and helped us work through the details. When user testing was difficult to arrange, a demonstration prototype let us gather early feedback and make small design changes, showing us the next steps.

OptiTech added another layer of integration. Its configuration and update workflows needed to fit into the larger PrevenTech experience and support several releases. We clarified how design, shared components, and development priorities worked together. This gave teams a practical plan to deliver smaller feature sets and move steadily toward the bigger vision, connecting each step with the final integration into PrevenTech.