Product portfolio

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Revision as of 11:42, 7 June 2012 by Martien (talk | contribs) (Extended list of benefits; experiment with Cite.)
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…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: