Product portfolio

…a complex multi-product endeavor.

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A product portfolio and its corresponding management:

1. maximizes value creation, thereby increasing ROI (reducing cost, increasing effectiveness and efficiency, creating more value);
2. aligns company strategy;
3. reduces the overall risk level and concurrent, often competing, activities by bringing focus.

Therefore:

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In general, a comprehensive product portfolio boosts your unfair sustainable competitive advantage.

In more detail, a product portfolio:

• helps scaling agile development;
• shortens time to market due to less thrashing;
• focuses and aligns all forces;
• makes prioritization clear;
• moves the organization from a handover mindset to a “let's optimize the flow of value creation” mindset;
• structures the way of starting initiatives and new product development;
• shows a clear, broad, and visible overview of all ongoing activities, currently and in the foreseeable future;
• eliminates the struggle to complete projects within schedule;
• avoids the competition over resources (budget, people);
• causes smaller projects to be managed as part of the portfolio;
• homogenizes the type of projects included in the portfolio; more harmonization, less waste;
• increases or unveils the amount of product developers' time allocated to real product development;
• reduces the effort spent on resource allocation, and may even be eliminated when properly implemented;
• provides the right amount and level of progress data;
• helps the organization to make more informed decisions, considering the whole portfolio;
• helps coordinating the work of multiple scrum teams;
• manages cross-team risks and dependencies;
• enacts the company vision;
• handles the silos of knowledge and skills (if not already tackled by communities of practice);
• defines investment themes that drive resource allocation (also consider buy a feature and perpetual multi-voting);
• deals with “competing backlogs”;
• can be effectively carried out by merging the backlogs of different product offerings into a single backlog, and then perform backlog management on that single backlog (one backlog to rule them all);<ref name="layman vodde scaling practices" Craig Larman and Bas Vodde, Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Large, Multisite, and Offshore Product Development with Large-Scale Scrum. Boston, MA, USA. Addison-Wesley, 2010,</ref>
• uses epic-scale initiatives to express the portfolio vision in practice to guide forthcoming product releases;
• delivers minimal marketable features in a steady flow;

Forces:

• visual management provides clear understanding to all stakeholders;

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