Gartner Research

Critical Steps for Product Managers: Align and Reconcile Portfolios

Published: 06 March 2023

Summary

Product portfolios evolve over time through both organic development and acquisitions, resulting in unintended feature overlaps and product outliers that confuse buyers and impact revenue. To respond, product managers must align and reconcile their portfolios by following three critical steps.

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Overview

Key Findings
  • Changes in business strategy, shifting market trends and acquisitions can lead to disjointed portfolios containing outdated, underperforming and overlapping products.

  • Misaligned portfolios and overlapping products or features create confusion among key stakeholders and buyers that results in lost revenue.

  • Maintaining the status quo in portfolios with underperforming products and duplicate features decreases margins and robs growth products and new product concepts of critical investment.

Recommendations

Product managers charged with the evolution and management of product portfolios must:

  • Institutionalize a regular, comprehensive portfolio analysis to identify gaps and assess financial performance, growth potential and overlap with other products.

  • Create product roadmaps with timelines to

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Analysts:

Dan Tolan

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