How the Right Product Portfolio Management Solution Boosts ROI

In enterprise organizations, product management ROI is more than just a metric. It is the scorecard that proves your strategy is working. To drive real growth, you need to ensure that every resource across every team is working on initiatives that actually add value to the business.

However, you cannot optimize what you cannot see. If you are struggling to connect daily execution to high-level strategy, your return on investment is likely suffering. This is why your product portfolio management methodology is so critical. The root of the problem often lies in how the portfolio is managed in the first place.

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 allows you to improve ROI with portfolio management.

1. Maximize Product Management ROI with Better Strategic Decisions.

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.

In this metaphor, your Product Managers are the position coaches, and you are the Head Coach. To drive product management ROI, you need to look past individual demands and see the bigger picture:

• The Conflict: Individual PMs naturally prioritize their own product goals, which often compete with other, more beneficial opportunities for the company.
• The Solution: Just as a Head Coach needs the full roster view, you need a single-pane-of-glass view of your entire portfolio.
• The Result: By connecting roadmaps, OKRs, and status updates in one place, you can prioritize the initiatives that actually support the company’s business goals, rather than just the loudest requests.

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 they lack a central view of the team’s plan, they miss a critical cross-department dependency:

• The Disconnect: The offensive coach demands extra sprints, unaware of the strength coach’s plan.
• The Consequence: This counterproductive approach exhausts players and risks injury without actually improving their times.
• The Fix: With a centralized view, they could sequence the work for success: First practice speed drills with the strength coach, then test sprint times.

The same applies to 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.