Product Portfolio Management: A Complete Guide in 7 Points (2021)

Introduction

An organization is largely dependent on how it makes and manages its strategic decisions of any new or its existing product. Some companies have made decisions without any tangible, real data that impacted how their products would perform in the future. There is a lot of analysis that goes into directing the resource and allocating the budget. This is where product portfolio management comes into the picture to prioritize the projects specific to the product, ensuring that the resources are optimized.

Here we discuss the product portfolio management and the challenges, techniques, and benefits that it brings forth with it.

In this article let us look at:

1. What is PPM?
2. Objectives
3. Benefits
4. Goals
5. Challenges
6. Techniques
7. PPM Roadmap

1. What is PPM?

Product portfolio management is about managing the entire product portfolio of an organization. The product portfolio manager is responsible for allocating resources to ensure an optimal ROI, identifying the key areas of improvement, and ensuring that the product is aligned with the organization’s broader strategy.

2. Objectives

The objective of product portfolio management is to take a strategic and broad view of the company’s complete product catalog. The product portfolio manager will identify the market’s key opportunities and use better ways for resource allocation.

The product manager will also see if the company can benefit when it redirects its development and its support resources to some other initiative when the product is at a declining stage.

Product portfolio management is also about improving the products that address the users’ needs. They may add new tools to the products that exist to attract customers.

Product portfolio management thus helps the business by not just seeing the product only but also visualizing how the broader market is performing. It evaluates the products to understand how they perform relative to each other, and this lets the company take a stand on which products to prioritize. It lets the management estimate what gaps need filling. This is important to grab new opportunities, increase their revenue and meet their business objectives.

3. Benefits

There are many advantages that product portfolio management brings to any business. It offers a centralized view of a range of products against how the products are currently performing in the marketplace. The portfolio management approach eliminates the agendas and initiatives that are competing for the development of the product. It allows us to decide whether to allocate resources to strengthen a product in the growing market against improving an offering or eliminating it. Product portfolio management makes use of data-driven methods that helps in streamlining the research and development that identifies the markets and the products that offer the best opportunities for growth, development, and profitability. 

If your company has an effective product portfolio management, then you benefit from:

• Improvement in positioning among your competitors
• Maximizing investment in products
• Identifying the weak and strong products to understand the ways to allocate resources
• Ensuring that the business objectives and the product investments are aligned
• Prioritizing the focus on the product
• Improving collaboration and communication

4. Goals

To get the maximum benefits, individual product initiatives must be focused on. The products are analyzed both on how it performs for the business and how it is placed in the market. It lets companies allocate resources to enhance the product and to bring in new product developments. It helps to bolster those products that are capable of a breakthrough.

Some of the goals that the company aims to meet through product portfolio management are:

• Identifying those products that have a higher demand in the market
• Eliminating the products that are underperforming in the market
• Allocating the resources to those products that look promising
• Identifying products that dominate in a slow-growth market
• Improving, rebranding, or changing the product in a promising market
• Balancing out the long and the short term goals
• Developing better communication and links that meet the corporate strategy

5. Challenges

The main challenge mentioned in the portfolio management job description is setting clear goals to centralize the product management process. The challenge arises because people have a resistance to change. This is especially when the change is to eliminate the product. There may be trouble to sell any plans for new resource allocation because this means that some products would have to meet a decrease in their resource allocation.

Also, the overall product portfolio management gaols could be different in an organization. The top management would be only interested in the financial parts and have a clear goal that points towards profitability and growth. This makes it mandatory to have a clear communication line and a strategy that is well defined to align the daily operations and the financial goals of the company.

6. Techniques

It may be difficult to introduce Product portfolio management in your organization, but various techniques make the transition easy. One method makes use of a scoring method that uses numeric scales to determine how effective the product is in the market.

The X-Y graph is a better way that offers a visualization to analyze how a product is forming in the market.

Product decisions are difficult. This is where the product portfolio management comes into the picture to identify which are the breakthrough products.

7. PPM Roadmap

The product portfolio management has a roadmap and also a destination. It follows a timeline and a route that ensures that all move in the same direction. A product portfolio management roadmap can be a communication tool to offer information visually to the stakeholders. The roadmap should provide crucial data and goal settings that can scale up and meet the company’s cross-functional needs across divisions. Many tools can be used to identify the goals and to prioritize the initiatives.

Conclusion

Product portfolio management does not just look at the entire product portfolio but also monitors how the market performs. It evaluates how the product is doing relative to each other. It shows how the relative performance should make the company prioritize a product. It also finds out the gaps that need to be filled, which aids in the business’s growth.

To learn all the tricks and techniques in the trade, opt for our Product Management Course. It is the ultimate guide for Product Management 101. The 6-month certificate program is designed to offer extensive knowledge with a hands-on approach. The certification is in collaboration with the best minds from IIM-Indore, who will share their Product Management experiences and best practices. This program is one of its kind in India as it takes you through the complete product development life cycle. It is the best option for future CEOs and aspiring professionals who wish to make a stable career in Product Management.

Also Read

What Is Product Management: An Easy 6 Step Guide (2021)