The process of a very, very organized Product Director (from last year!) was the basis for this story. Her color-coded portfolio roadmap consisted of 4 spreadsheets (out of about 100!), 2 project management tools and 1 whiteboard photo (taken every Monday morning). She’s super strategic. However, after walking through all her spreadsheets and going through her process with her, I could clearly see that her system had long since reached a point where it was totally out of her control. In the end, it was so dense and so hard to kill. It totally didn’t matter what the original goals of that process had been anymore.
So now you know that this is not about a disorganized operator. This is about an extremely organized, extremely smart operator whose execution velocity is greater than the organization’s ability to reflect on that execution. So how do you keep up? How do you make sure your strategy is still reflected in your portfolio when things are moving so fast?
The portfolio trap most teams don’t see coming
The greatest trap that Product teams fall into with regards to managing a growing portfolio of products is the inability to view the whole portfolio while solely executing on their individual product lines. The strategic thinking is there, but it gets drowned out by the sheer volume of work associated with executing on a growing product line in a rapidly changing environment. In fact, it’s often common for teams to say they don’t have time to step back and plan out their portfolio as a whole until after the current quarter’s launch has completed. But a launch is never really completed, and in the meantime, the portfolio continues to drift.
A product in the portfolio that should probably be cut from it, to free up resources for more valuable things, is instead using up engineering resources to keep it going. A product that could make a lot of money for the company is not being given the space to build a business case for itself during planning time, because there are not enough people to tackle the task. And so the portfolio roadmap looks a lot like a list of products for which various teams are expending resources and for which various people are sending out periodic panicked emails to try to get someone’s attention in order to ask a question.
Managing a large portfolio of products without a set of tools to manage that portfolio is like navigating a large city by just reading the signs in front of you. Yes, you will be moving around but you have no idea where you are going. Whether you are going in circles or not is hard to tell.
Where the strategic focus actually breaks down
The Strategic Focus of a CRO’s Portfolio Drifts Slowly and Then Suddenly – Usually Due to 4 seemingly Insignificant Issues.
- Resource allocation that mirrors habit rather than priority. Teams fund what they funded last year because building a fresh case takes time nobody actually has.
- Portfolio reviews that happen too infrequently, leaving decisions to whoever holds authority and the loudest opinion in the room between cycles.
- Products evaluated in isolation, with no visibility into how they compete for the same customers, the same supply chain capacity, or the same sales bandwidth.
- Strategy documents living undisturbed in a shared folder that nobody opens between annual planning cycles.
While each of these problems can be individually addressed and will alleviate some pain in portfolio planning, when all of them start to occur simultaneously it will become virtually impossible to manage the increasing complexity.
Common places where a product portfolio planning process can go awry.
| Planning activity | Common friction point | What it costs |
| Portfolio review meetings | No shared data source, so half the meeting is spent reconciling numbers | Decisions get deferred or made on incomplete information |
| Resource allocation | Visibility into competing demands is limited or piecemeal | High-priority work gets chronically under-resourced |
| Roadmap updates | Changes aren’t tethered to strategic rationale | Teams lose the thread on why decisions were made six months ago |
| Product exit decisions | No formal criteria, so sunset conversations stall indefinitely | Underperforming products drag resources for years |
What actually helps (and what doesn’t)
There is no silver bullet or quick fix to tackle a problem that so many organizations struggle with on a daily basis. However, there is a very practical and pragmatic approach that organizations can use to deal with a growing portfolio of products and maintain strategic focus. This approach starts with a very simple yet very uncomfortable question: What is your current planning process designed to accomplish.
First, most processes are only designed to help teams see the products that are currently in a portfolio. No real help in figuring out what should be in the portfolio in the first place. There’s a big difference between a map of all the roads in an area and a map with the best route highlighted for a particular journey.
Organizations looking to stay informed about evolving product strategy, technology trends, and practical business insights can also explore TechGalaxcy for additional resources.
A few things to note here about the handful of large portfolios of products at strategic focus that I’ve studied: First, each of these teams have very clear written criteria for how to evaluate, prioritize, and kill off products. Second, each of these teams surface the trade-offs that they have to make in their planning and do not let these trade-offs die in the footnotes of planning documents. Third, each of these teams organize their planning around a single ‘source of truth’ and that this ‘source of truth’ explicitly connects back to business goals for every item on the roadmap.
(There is, of course, the alternative explanation that this is a matter of discipline and meeting culture, and that a group of reasonable, smart people can keep all 15 or so products in three or so business units straight. That it does work, for a bit, until it doesn’t, around the 15/3 threshold, is beside the point. As with so many things, the problem here is a matter of scale.)
Tools can also help to make strategic thinking possible for teams struggling with large portfolios. At Gocious we are seeing more and more product-led companies build out their portfolio planning tools such as product portfolio planning software. These portfolio planning tools can help product-led companies manage and make strategic decisions for their growing product portfolio. A spreadsheet or even a project management tool is not well equipped to surface out trade-offs between products in a large portfolio. A purpose-built portfolio planning tool enables companies to map out their entire portfolio against their strategic priorities, and ask different and more valuable questions of their product portfolio. Examples of such questions that a portfolio planning tool can help to surface are: why are we building this product instead of that one? Is the value we are creating for our customers increasing over time? Which part of the portfolio has the highest ROI? Is there too much overlap between products and can we reduce it?
The real question worth sitting with
Is your portfolio of products reflecting your company’s strategy or your company’s history?
Products and roadmaps that are developed reflect a company’s strategy at a given point in time. Over time, however, as the company grows and evolves, the company’s strategy will also evolve. As a result, the portfolio of products developed by a company may not reflect the company’s current strategy, even though it did at the time that individual products were developed.
The above discussion leads us to the conclusion that we have been speaking of strategic focus as a posture which one can safeguard once adopted, as if portfoliomanaging were a form of guerrilla warfare in which one could only take cover, wait for hostilities to cease and then re-emerge to resume fighting. In reality strategic focus is merely a point of view which one has to take frequently.
No software can solve this problem for you. However, the right software can help to highlight the problems before they are too late to correct.
