Portfolio Monitoring for Growth 

Complete access to your entire product portfolio from anywhere.

To remotely manage your product portfolio and make meaningful impact on your organisation growth, here is part 2 of our 3-part series guide - The Product Manager’s guide to remote working: Finding portfolio growth.  Virtually monitoring your entire product portfolio is an important key to solving product lifecycle challenges.

An overwhelming number of product executives  agree that managing the lifecycle of a product portfolio is essential for profitable growth. Unfortunately, many find it challenging to do this effectively and efficiently especially during this time. We’ll cover in this guide how to monitor and reassess your entire product portfolio at scale so that you have the tools and tips to start improving product growth right away .

It is easy to get bogged down in the day to day reactive reporting. Defining a product strategy and launching an MVP is one thing, but understanding what is driving product growth and profitable results is a whole other story.   These are some of the reasons it is challenging to review your entire product portfolio as a virtual team:

1. The product insights you need are dispersed across multiple places like a shared drive, PowerPoint decks, consultant reports, analytics dashboards and agile teams.  You have heaps of data but strategic insight is lacking.
2. The in-depth product knowledge wasn’t effectively retained or lost in hand-over between product owner and operations team.
3. Everyone is too busy keeping up with the day to day operations and the many product innovation initiatives to pursue.
4. Focusing on traditional lifecycle metrics that no longer work like the monitoring of past trends like sales revenue, customer engagement and product maturity.

What does collaborative product portfolio growth mean for product owners and leaders

Product portfolio management at scale is an important key to understanding how your products can be more successful in the market . A product  portfolio review enables product leaders to deal with disruption, work out how a group of products can be more successful in the market and make investment choices more effectively. Gathering insight on product health and profitability across the various products will lay the foundations for you to have a high impact on business growth. Product leaders should be aware of the health of each product and its portfolio context in the business.  

Product Portfolio Management at scale often requires many product managers and contributors to come together across the organization. These portfolio reviews can be time-consuming; however, the strategic benefit of taking the helicopter up and testing strategy fit, implementation and alignment across the business is critical for success in modern product lifecycles.  

A best practice portfolio review covers improving outlook, competitive positioning, product experience and risk minimisation so you can update senior executives on strategy.

No company will have all products at the same level of maturity, growth and profitability. Some products may be an early MVP, and others mature and generating cash for the business. The idea is to understand the future growth potential of new products and for mature products, how to enhance and reduce costs and therefore make more profit. Product leaders need to set-up consistent product and portfolio monitoring to champion a direction and get support for the decisions about whether to introduce a new product or to change strategy, continue or discontinue the product or feature.  This is why it is worth investing in a consistent full view of product health and reporting as a collaborative virtual team.  

Why a collaborative approach to managing product portfolio at scale is worth the investment

For product leaders in companies of any size that offer a range of products to customers reviewing your entire product portfolio will help you achieve business objectives of higher market share, increased sales and profitable growth and compliance. Here are some of the top-line benefits of taking a collaborative approach to reviewing your product portfolio.

• Frees up product manager and company resources to focus on best alternatives and pursue viable options for better business growth
• Reduces the risk of disruption and gaps in product compliance
• Validate the assumptions in your strategy and UVP and change tact quickly
• Early warning that you have gaps or weaknesses in product strategy
• Consistent, automated and time-saving updates to leadership

A Product health-check with your virtual team to maximize product success 

The product health-check is the best first step to finding growth and managing your product lifecycle.  The health-check is a new data driven tool developed by Skyjed in 2017 to help product leaders get virtual team and leadership buy-in on product decisions and growth.   We have spent many years building and refining this modern approach of an Ai-based tool for product leaders to make forward-looking decisions that helps you feel confident about growth decisions. Our algorithm will help you focus and decide how your product can be more successful in the market and set action plans. 

The health-check is easy to interpret and is presented to you in a colour coded score.  The ultimate outcome you will achieve through the health-check is discover current strengths and risks to focus your product strategy and taking action.

Together as a virtual team, you can dig deep into product health - opportunities and risks across five domains - revenue, value, customer experience, innovation and regulatory compliance so you can co-create 90 day plans and actions - both strategic and risk mitigation

So what can you expect using Skyjed platform?  Your virtual team can access your entire portfolio history from anywhere and get data-backed insights for high growth and scaling:

• Map each product at lifecycle stage status and pull reports
• Classify and compare for new opportunities across products
• Work on costs and optimise product revenue
• Analyze market opportunities and risks
• Eliminate surprises – take action with action plans
• A powerful Heath-check report is your validated knowledge and removes opinion and helps influence product story, direction and decisions.
• Automates all the workflow you need for high growth and scaling product lifecycle management.

Best practice tips for remote collaboration and product portfolio management

Product leadership is all about monitoring your strategy and results quickly, and sharing out updates with your engaged virtual team.  As a Product professional you may struggle to find time to juggle the many product leader hats.  Following these best practice steps will give you all the insights you need to champion growth and get buy-in.  

1. Build a virtual team and host your product team – to update and improve – includes product owners and contributors across the business.
2. Decide on a review cadence and complete regular strategic monitoring on your essential products. 
3. The timing and consistency of reviews are important - one-off monitoring and strategic reviews wont bring excellence.  
4. Compare products – revenue, margin, product UVP and competitive analysis to uncover intelligence about competitors in the market for new insights for sales and business success
5. Compiling the analysis can capitalise on strengths and opportunities and revisit your UVP
6. Pull it all together in product health-check report - AI generated product health scores - present to you a deep understanding of what needs to be improved and what are the opportunities for growth
7. Compiled into a summary health-check report – presenting the highlights that the leadership team needs to know. Automated reporting and central action management free up time to spend on the things that matter most 

So how can you improve product growth and stay ahead of the competition using Skyjed?

Skyjed helps you build a virtual team to collaborate and improve the health of your product on an ongoing basis.  Whether you are a small team or a large one, you will have complete access to the entire product portfolio from anywhere. When should you plan to complete a product health-check? One-off monitoring and audits of your product portfolio will set a good baseline. However, on-offs are not generally useful. Continuous monitoring is necessary to get up with the pace of change and measuring the efficiency of your product strategy as a virtual team, backed by data and forward-looking insights:

The benefits:

1. All your product data in one place, organised and accessible. Anytime, anywhere.
2. Skyjed’s virtual team capability makes remote working a breeze. Whether your team is in the next office or spread out across the Globe, Skyjed will make it seem like like everyone is sitting around the table.
   
   
3. AI-generated product health scores - get a deep understanding of what needs to be improved and what are the opportunities for growth
   
   
4. Automated reporting and central action management free up time to spend on the things that matter most - driving product growth

Create your virtual team in minutes, start a product audit and publish your first health-check report in 12 minutes.  Benchmark your product strategy with 90-day health-check and host your virtual team from marketing, customer experience, finance and operations.

Product manager with 1-4 products

Insight 1:  Understand the health-check score of your product strategy

Insight 2: Compare your product health-check score over 12 months.

Benchmark #: Compare the health-check score between all your products, so you know where to invest time for opportunity and risks.

Product manager with 10+ products

Benchmark 1: Compare your product health-check score over 12 months.

Benchmark 2: Compare your products with other product managers in your company

Head Product with multiple in-market portfolios and innovation growth responsibility 

Start your team using a collaborative tool and review your entire portfolio to set a baseline. The team and platform can be up and running in days with supported video tutorials on all the expert leanings on product growth and compliance. This will surface gaps in your product planning and risks.

Benchmark 1: compare health-check at life stage status

Benchmark 2: compare health-check versus growth potential

Benchmark 3: compare products across regulatory compliance and customer complaints.

Benchmark 4: compare product manager collaborative, engagement and action planning.

Check out our guide  How to conduct a launch-ready review to help you save time in reporting and align your virtual team on what needs to be done to find product market fit and scale growth.