I spoke with a product manager at a fairly large product-centric company last year. She had set out to make a list of where her company stored product data. After some considerable effort, she quit at 11 systems. Every time the leadership wanted a portfolio review (say quarterly), it would take her and her team 3 months of full time work to get together all the numbers relevant to review the portfolio. And then they would be counting things in 2 ways and they wouldn’t know which was correct by the time the review happened. She described it as a large data problem but really it was just a very hard jigsaw puzzle where half the pieces were in different rooms. The hardest part was no one had a sense of what the complete picture would look like.
There’s a big difference between a technology problem and a purely technology problem. Most manufacturing technology problems are only partly technology problems. For the most part, technology problems within manufacturing are data problems that have been masquerading as technology problems. Pulling all the data from every place it lives within a company and combining it all into a single dashboard or other means of gaining visibility into the combined scope of your business is a technology problem.
Step 2: Stop thinking that everything can be solved with more visibility and understand the underlying problems.
First, understanding that most organizations have competing objectives within various departments such as Sales focusing on volume, Engineering on capacity and Finance on margin per SKU, it’s easy to see how the portfolio of products will continue to grow. It is often easier to add products than to remove them from the portfolio. Nobody likes to take a product off the market, it is painful and usually someone gets fired. The way that organizations treat products that are not successful is often less than optimal and this can have a huge impact on visibility into the overall product portfolio.
Managing a product portfolio without shared visibility is like navigating a warehouse in the dark. You know the inventory is there. You just keep running into it instead of finding what you need.
The first question that must be asked is: Who is going to interpret this data, for what purpose, and how fast will they be able to make a decision with it? These are three very different problems.
The four places visibility actually breaks down
There are 4 key areas where visibility problems can occur within a manufacturing organization. Typically these are interrelated but one area may be the root cause of visibility problems in a manufacturing organization.
- Product lifecycle gaps: Teams don’t have a clear view of where each product sits in its lifecycle, so sunset decisions get postponed indefinitely
- Scattered data ownership: Specs live in engineering, pricing lives in finance, customer feedback lives in sales, and nobody has the composite view
- No shared prioritization framework: When everything is a priority, nothing is
- Slow feedback loops: By the time market signals reach the portfolio planning team, the window to act has often closed
A laundry list of current manufacturing ills. The fact that these are current issues does not mean they are unique to your company or that they are insoluble. In fact, many of the ills listed above are typical of companies in rapid growth and will
See Above for Portfolio Puzzles.
Visibility is a means to an end. That end is to create value by making wise portfolio decisions. To achieve this end a portfolio that is visible, cross functional, current and trusted is required. Decisions such as extending or retiring a product should be made based on the overall portfolio’s performance. This means that the entire portfolio must be visible and current. By having a clear and current view of the entire portfolio’s performance leadership no longer has to ‘fly blind’ making poor decisions without having all the facts. The portfolio reviews that are required will no longer be time consuming ‘archeology projects’ digging through old data in various formats to come up with a incomplete view of the current portfolio. The product managers will be able to focus on analyzing the data rather than gathering the data in the first place.
You wouldn’t believe how much time your product managers spend gathering data to analyze instead of actually analyzing the data in front of them. This is a huge problem for most companies, but it’s an especially huge problem for companies with complex product portfolios.
A dedicated product portfolio visibility software for manufacturers, like Gocious, is typically a single software system to manage all the information related to products within a manufacturing company’s product portfolio. A Portfolio Management System is typically a PM System which is a type of software system built from the ground up to manage a product portfolio, rather than for example an ERP system (Enterprise Resource Planning system) which manages a variety of processes within a company and as such also a product portfolio, but the PM System is tailored to answer the specific questions of managing a product portfolio, and therefore of managing a portfolio of products.
Practical Steps for Visibility (in rough order of priority)
- Audit where your product data actually lives. Not where it’s supposed to live. Where it actually lives. You’ll find things in places that genuinely surprise you — someone’s personal drive, a legacy system nobody realized was still running, a spreadsheet that one person has been maintaining manually for four years because the official system never quite worked.
- Establish a single portfolio owner. Not a committee. A person. Someone accountable for the whole picture.
- Define your portfolio taxonomy. Product families, tiers, lifecycle stages. Get agreement on the categories before you worry about the tools, because without shared definitions, even perfect data produces incoherent conclusions.
- Standardize the metrics that matter. Revenue contribution, margin, strategic alignment score, complexity cost. Pick the ones your leadership actually uses in decisions and build visibility around those, not around what’s easiest to measure.
The biggest challenge for Step 2 is aligning with an organization that is already structured around individual products. That group will have their own goals, their own strategies, and their own metrics for success. It is uncomfortable to give someone the role and responsibility of creating a portfolio of products, when they will have to make hard trade-off decisions that are negative for individual products, and potentially negative for individual functional groups. It is much easier to give someone the responsibility of defining a portfolio of products, rather than a single person responsible for the entire portfolio.
Comparing visibility approaches by maturity level
| Maturity level | Typical setup | Key limitation |
| Early stage | Spreadsheets, shared drives, tribal knowledge | Version control is a nightmare; no single source of truth |
| Developing | ERP data supplemented by manual reporting | Slow, labor-intensive, still reactive |
| Advanced | Integrated portfolio platform with defined ownership | Requires organizational alignment to sustain |
| Optimized | Real-time visibility tied to planning and roadmap decisions | High investment; only justified at scale |
As a general rule, most manufacturers are somewhere along the early stage to developing stage in terms of practices used to develop visibility of their product portfolio. Yes, this is a very broad term and in many cases there are common practices that are used by many manufacturers. However, the hardest part of developing a product portfolio is the maintenance of the portfolio view once it has been built. Many attempts at developing visibility of a product portfolio fail at this step.
There is one problem that affects most product managers today. The problem is that their product data lives in 11 systems and none of them create the transparency that the product managers are looking for. Many vendors claim to offer a “visibility” solution but until a vendor has built a solution from the ground up to solve the problems of a product portfolio manager, that solution will not work as promised. (See our Product Portfolio Visibility software for manufacturers.) Such a solution will treat your product data differently than your current systems do and will ask and answer different questions.
