How do you manage product portfolios across different business units and geographies?

1 Define your product portfolio

A product portfolio is a collection of products that serve a common market, customer segment, or business goal. It can span across multiple business units and geographies, depending on the organization's structure and strategy. To define your product portfolio, you need to identify and categorize your products according to their value proposition, lifecycle stage, performance, and strategic fit. You also need to map your products to your business capabilities, processes, and stakeholders, to understand how they support and enable your business outcomes.

2 Align your product portfolio with your business strategy

Your product portfolio should reflect and support your business strategy, which defines your vision, mission, goals, and value proposition. Your business strategy should guide your product portfolio decisions, such as which products to invest in, grow, maintain, or retire. You should also align your product portfolio with your market and customer needs, and monitor how they evolve over time. You can use tools such as SWOT analysis, PESTEL analysis, and Porter's five forces to assess your external and internal environment, and identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

4 Optimize your product portfolio for value and efficiency

Your product portfolio should deliver value to your customers and your business, while minimizing costs and risks. To optimize your product portfolio for value and efficiency, you need to measure and evaluate your product portfolio performance, using metrics such as revenue, profit, market share, customer satisfaction, and innovation. You should also balance your product portfolio mix, ensuring that you have a diverse and complementary set of products that cover different markets, segments, and stages. You should also leverage synergies and economies of scale across your products, by sharing resources, capabilities, and best practices.

5 Adapt your product portfolio to changing conditions

Your product portfolio should be agile and responsive to changing conditions, such as customer feedback, market trends, competitor actions, and regulatory requirements. To adapt your product portfolio to changing conditions, you need to foster a culture of learning and experimentation, by testing and validating your product assumptions, hypotheses, and outcomes. You should also embrace change and uncertainty, by applying lean and agile principles and practices, such as iterative development, incremental delivery, and feedback loops. You should also anticipate and mitigate risks, by conducting scenario planning, risk analysis, and contingency planning.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?