How the Right Product Portfolio Management Solution Boosts ROI

What’s Your Product Portfolio Management Methodology Today?

If you’re a product leader at a large company managing multiple product lines, you know you need visibility across your teams to ensure you have all the necessary information to make the best possible strategic decisions for the business.

Every product organization has some process for managing their portfolio of products and initiatives. But unfortunately, because the industry has historically lacked a solution specifically designed with Product Portfolio Management in mind, most product executives have faced challenges in effectively managing the many moving parts across their departments. A few examples:

• Scattered and siloed data.
  Product leaders need a centralized source of product information to review and share the progress of their investment areas across the organization.

• Strategic-tactical gap.
  To understand how work across all product lines supports the progress of key initiatives and business objectives, product leaders need to see the big picture and connect top-down strategic planning with tactical bottom-up work across all product lines.

• Lack of visibility into key initiatives.
  Without a central location for all data across the company’s product portfolio, product leaders face difficulty visually breaking down and translating strategic planning into work items across product lines, and drilling down to products and features for fluid product delivery.

• No ability to manage dependencies across product lines.
  Without this all-important product portfolio management capability, product leaders will find it nearly impossible to manage dependencies and track alignment across product lines — which is necessary to enhance development efficiencies and prevent costly errors and delays.

• Lack of standardized processes and data models across product teams.
  Finally, because they don’t have a central product management hub uniting all teams across the product portfolio, product leaders struggle to rally teams around a uniform data model and implement standardized processes across all product lines.

 Bottom line: Without a centralized product portfolio view, how can a product leader fully understand the objectives, progress, successes, and setbacks of all strategic bets throughout the product organization? And without single-pane-of-glass visibility into the status of the whole product portfolio, how can product leaders know they’re making the right strategic bets to support the company’s business goals?

A Purpose-Built Product Portfolio Management Solution

For these reasons, we at craft.io have now built a solution specifically to help product leaders become more efficient and effective with their product portfolio management. Here are just a few of the ways deploying this solution can deliver significant ROI to your business.

1. Make the best strategic decisions to support the company’s business objectives.

The typical football team has more than a dozen coaches: an offensive coordinator, defensive coordinator, strength and conditioning coach, quarterback coach, and so on.

Because each of these professionals focuses only on their area of responsibility, it’s logical for the strength coach to want to devote more of the team’s limited practice time to weight training, while the defensive coordinator might instead want to prioritize more time on the field practicing defensive plays.

But at the team level, there’s only one primary strategic objective to all of these practices and drills: creating stronger, faster, more capable players.

 You can see where this metaphor is going: These coaches are individual Product Managers, and you — the product leader — are the organization’s head coach. And many of the most important strategic decisions you’ll make for your company require understanding where your Product Managers’ individual product goals or needs might conflict with other, more beneficial opportunities for your company.

Just as the head coach needs to see the full picture of all specialist coaches’ schedules and goals to come up with an overall plan that meets the team’s big strategic objectives, the product leader needs to see everything happening at the product portfolio level in one place. That’s the only way a product leader can determine what to prioritize in order to ensure the department is working toward the company’s business goals.

 That means you’ll want a single-pane-of-glass view of everything across your product department, connecting roadmaps, backlogs, strategies, OKRs, and current status levels of all initiatives underway. 

2. Increase efficiencies and reduce delays by monitoring processes and dependencies at the portfolio level.

Let’s return to our football metaphor. Imagine the offensive line coach becoming frustrated at the players’ disappointingly slow sprint times. Now imagine that the strength and conditioning coach has scheduled specific drills to increase the players’ speeds.

Because the two coaches aren’t sharing their schedules, and because there’s no central place to view the entire team’s strategic plan simultaneously, these coaches have missed an important cross-department dependency. The offensive line coach might demand hours and hours of additional sprints — a counterproductive approach that simply exhausts the players, and risks injuries, without improving their times.

If they had that centralized view, these coaches could have arranged their plans and objectives in the right way to achieve success: First, we give our players ample time to practice speed-enhancing drills with the strength coach, and then we test their sprint times.

The same goes for your product department.

With craft.io’s Product Portfolio Management, you can create and track dependencies across teams, products, and product lines — dependencies that if left unnoticed until it’s too late can lead to delayed work or errors, either of which can result in substantial costs in terms of additional resources and the opportunity costs of lost product revenue.

3. Deploy best practices and create standardization to improve efficiencies for all product teams.

Yet another way the right product portfolio management solution promises a substantial ROI is by standardizing all of your product teams’ work and giving them proven, best-practice processes for completing that work.

For example, craft.io lets you easily create and deploy a uniform data model and process for all of your product teams — so they are all aligned, the same way, and input  into their backlogs.

This means when you need to weigh competing initiatives across your portfolio to determine the most strategically beneficial bets to make for your company, you can conduct a true apples-to-apples comparison of all these initiatives using the same criteria: feedback data, prioritization scores (using your choice of craft.io’s many built-in prioritization frameworks), and more. 

Because it makes deploying a uniform data model quick and simple, craft.io’s Product Portfolio Management has the added benefit of streamlining your product teams’ workflows.

And most important from a product leadership standpoint, when all your product teams are maintaining a uniform record of their work in a solution that aggregates their data into a product portfolio view, you’ll have anywhere, anytime access to the whole strategic story of your product department — and the data you’ll need to make the best possible decisions for your company.

To your product portfolio’s success!

To see how your team can benefit from the
Product Portfolio Management solution,
Schedule a demo with a craft.io product executive.