Concept-to-Market
The design-time phase. Concept-to-Market turns a commercial idea into catalog entities that runtime systems can execute — a product offering, the customer-facing services beneath it, and the resource specifications those services decompose to. No customer is involved and no order exists.
- Clock
- Design-time
- Unit of work
- Per product
- Cadence
- Weeks to months
- Produces
- A published catalog
The constraint on Lead-to-Cash
Lead-to-Cash can only execute what Concept-to-Market defined. An order cannot be captured for an offer that was never modelled, and cannot be fulfilled down a path the catalog does not describe.
One pass through C2M ends at publication, not at a sale. Its deliverables are specifications and the relationships between them: what may be sold, what it is priced at, what it commits to, and how it is to be built. Everything downstream reads those specifications. Nothing downstream can add to them at runtime.
It is the phase most often truncated. A commercial product catalog stood up without the service and resource decomposition beneath it can quote but cannot fulfil, and the gap does not stay in the catalog — it reappears as manual configuration during fulfilment, then as inventory records no assurance system can interpret.
C2M is also not a subscription lifecycle answer. Modelling a product well says nothing about the instances of it already live, which were sold under earlier models and will not retro-fit themselves to the new one.
Modules in this phase
Concept-to-Market
From Product Idea to Executable Workflow
The design-time chain that produces what Lead-to-Cash executes — portfolio governance, catalog governance, and the implementation function that turns a published catalog into running workflows.
Catalog Modeling Deep Dive
Product, Service & Resource Catalogs
Master the three-layer catalog model: Product Offerings and Specifications, CFS/RFS decomposition, and how catalogs drive the entire order-to-activate chain.
Foundations and the reference modules — TMF Open APIs, frameworks, architecture patterns and the vendor landscape — apply across all three phases, so they are not listed under any one of them.
Hands downstream
C2M hands Lead-to-Cash a published catalog: the offers that may be quoted and the decomposition paths an order is allowed to take.
Next: L2C — Lead-to-Cash