GrandViewCentral

In a recent webinar on the Product Management View, we had a discussion about Roadmapping. There was a lot of discussion about creating a strategic roadmap. In the product management world, typically this isn’t the type of roadmap product managers are responsible for.  A roadmap is often thought of as a timeline of releases or features. It tells me what new features we’re going to add to my product in the next quarter or next few quarters. It’s typically focused on a single product and done be the product manager. These feature roadmaps are important to realizing the strategic roadmap. The strategy of the organization should drive, at least in part, the feature set of each release in the roadmap.

However, the roadmap isn’t just a feature planning tool for an individual product; it can be used by senior management to communicate the strategy and desired direction of the organization to each individual product manager. In the book “Leading Product Development” by Wheelwright and Clark it talks about these roadmaps and the role senior management plays as Product Line Architect. In this role, senior management defines the types of products that will be in the product line, such as breakthrough products or platform products. Take into consideration what the product line looks like to today’s customer, what it should look like in the near future, and the long-term view. They also determine the revenue and growth desired from each type of new product development.

Using a roadmap, senior management can plot out all the new products and their relationships to each other in order to communicate the desired direction of the company and the strategic vision. Having lunch with a VP of product management a few months ago, we discussed this type of roadmap. We plotted out on a timeline the current and future products in the product line and lifecycle of each going forward. We determined how much revenue, market share, growth, etc. we expected from each of the products at different times in the roadmap. This helped us plan out the new product projects to be introduced and products planned for end of life as well.

This type of roadmap, that I refer to as a strategic roadmap does not include feature sets, it is focused only on the types of products or new product projects, when they should be rolled out, and their relationship to each other. When used in this way, the roadmap becomes a key tool for communicating the direction of product development and our overall strategy.

DerickWorkman Product Portfolio Management

          The first step when performing portfolio management is to list the alternatives. When using PPM practices to make decisions we have to first try and identify all of the possible alternatives. The key here is to try to make it so the options are relevant and actually something you’d find plausible. The objective is not to come up with a huge list, unless the list represents actual possible choices. Depending on the decision we’re preparing to make this list may require you to solicit or brainstorm to come up with alternatives. In some cases the list is driven by customer requests, project needs, etc. In this case you will have a list of alternatives already for you, which make up your portfolio.

          A sub step to identifying alternatives is to segment them into sub-portfolios. This allows you to manage the alternatives in a much smaller group and will enable portfolio balancing later on. Sub-portfolios should be based on certain characteristics so that all elements of a sub-portfolio have those characteristics. These sub-portfolios create a hierarchy of aggregation for the entire portfolio. Characteristics for new business opportunities for example might include: investment risk, alignment to core-competencies, fit within existing product line, potential ROI, or market access. I would then create sub-portfolios for my organization that would use these characteristics to segment my portfolio of business opportunities.

          Let’s say I break it into 3 sub-portfolios and use typical ones from PPM called Maintenance & Utilities, Enhancements & Improvements, and Transformational. The Maintenance & Utilities sub-portfolio would include all business opportunities that had a low investment risk and ROI and small market size, but a very high fit with the existing product line and core-competencies. Thresholds would be setup for each characteristic to determine which of the 3 sub-portfolios a business opportunity should belong to. These sub-portfolios make it easier to perform the other 4 steps in portfolio management and to achieve one of the 3 goals of PPM: Balancing the portfolio.

DerickWorkman Product Portfolio Management