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Product portfolio roadmap template
It is important to have clear visibility into product plans and areas of investment across your entire product portfolio. A product portfolio roadmap template can help you manage and track various releases for different products.
What does a product portfolio manager do?
Product portfolio managers are responsible for guiding and implementing the product portfolio strategy. The role is a weighty one — you are responsible for the overall health of the product portfolio that you manage. This includes creating and owning the product portfolio roadmap and tracking KPIs.
Depending on the size of the organization and scope of its product portfolio, product portfolio managers might be responsible for a specific vertical, a group of products in the same product line, or everything the company offers.
This includes overseeing new product development, managing existing products' lifecycles, and integrating any products brought on through M&A:
New product development
Introducing new products consumes significant organizational resources. Product portfolio managers provide value by monitoring market trends and generating a business case for new offerings that could fill a gap in the product portfolio.
Product lifecycle management
Current products must be evaluated in motion for optimal results. The product portfolio manager creates a product portfolio roadmap to evaluate collective performance and ensure activities support upstream business initiatives and revenue goals. Evaluating product KPIs can help with choosing where to invest across the product portfolio and where to improve. Part of the process is also identifying when to divest from a product in decline.
M&As
Looking outward for M&A opportunities is another way to grow the portfolio. Product portfolio managers assess the market and make recommendations to senior executives who ultimately decide where to invest.
Product portfolio KPIs
Product portfolio performance measurement is another core responsibility of a product portfolio manager. What are the strategic targets for a product portfolio? What KPIs must be defined and captured?
Product portfolio managers identify and track metrics that help assess how the product portfolio impacts business goals. Many of these metrics are similar to what product managers track for an individual product.
Here are some examples of product portfolio-specific KPIs and metrics include:
Market share
Product portfolio diversity
Revenue
Profitability
ROI
Related:
What are the challenges of product portfolio management?
One of the biggest challenges with product portfolio management is organizational expertise and experience. Other challenges include shortsighted decisions, such as launching new products that cannibalize the long-term profitability of the existing portfolio.
Many companies struggle with product portfolio management as a discipline and lack portfolio-level thinking. When the organization is not able to connect company goals to product portfolio decisions, you end up with bloated, disjointed, or unbalanced portfolios that do not deliver value to customers or to the business.
Related:
Others do not have a true understanding of product portfolio management and take a limited view that focuses on new product development. This often leads to companies introducing new offerings and overlooking portfolio cleanup. Low-performing products are left to continue operating and consume resources without close oversight, which can drag down the overall value of the product portfolio.
A deep understanding of product lifecycles, having a framework for product development activities and product decision-making, and being able to connect company-level goals to the product portfolio level (then down to each individual product) is crucial for success.
Even in an organization with a comfortable investment cushion, careful attention should be paid to the level of complexity and value creation within the product portfolio.
FAQs about product portfolio management
Careful product portfolio management ensures a company's long-term growth — it prioritizes offerings that are strategically aligned and offer tangible value to users. Growing companies may lack the expertise to carefully weigh product portfolio decisions. In turn, this may lead to portfolios that fail to deliver value to users and the organization.
The key here is remaining mindful of portfolio decisions from the onset.
We cover what a product portfolio manager does in depth in this section. We also have a blog post comparing the product manager vs. product portfolio manager roles.
But in short, a product portfolio manager is responsible for shaping and executing on their organization's product portfolio strategy. In this role, you own the product portfolio roadmap and any associated KPIs. The exact scope of the role may also vary depending on the organization.
Building a product portfolio roadmap in purpose-built roadmapping software makes sure everyone can quickly visualize ongoing work. Aha! Roadmaps offers this option (and helps you tie every work item back to companywide goals and initiatives).
We also have a portfolio roadmap template available in Aha! Whiteboards if you need a more lightweight option.
