Product Management has a strong strategic role within product-driven organizations. And yet, it is fraught with archaic processes and tools. Here, we discuss topics that every Product Manager, CEO and any team member contributing to product planning should be familiar with. The content is meant to spotlight Product Management as a discipline, examine existing frameworks and tools, and suggest how this functional area can succeed in today’s environment while setting up for the future.

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Value Map charts to help product portfolio managers take advantage of the market conditions and position their products for success. Using Value Maps, as a product manager, you can compare your products against competitors in terms of value and price to devise the best strategy to enter or adjust the position of your products in the market. 

Launching a new product can be a bit like a science experiment. You have made observations and created a hypothesis with data that supports your claims. Next, the hypothesis gets approved so you launch the product thus testing it.

Now its time to draw conclusions and refine the hypothesis.  

But this presents you with a problem. Your original hypothesis data is not the same as that returning from the real world. So what can you do?

Understanding how well a market segment is served can provide you with invaluable insight as to the opportunities available for new products and areas to stay away from.  Can you imagine what a difference it would make to see in one visual how your product serves the market segments alongside your competition and whether there is a gap you can exploit?

In our conversations with you, it is clear that developing your product portfolio based on its features alone and without considering price can be risky and incomplete. So we decided to engineer and develop tools that enable you to analyze and make decisions on setting and communicating your products' price. Today we are pleased to announce the first step in a series of launches providing you with the ability to decide, capture and share price sheets for each of your products, including the impact that options would have on the price. With this capability, you can define multiple price sheets for your product and see the ranges of the prices your products will cover depending on the options selected.

If you want your company to grow and expand, the key to success is a solid product strategy. Your product strategy must be flexible and nimble to quickly react to changing market conditions. Our research has found that product managers rarely use specialized tools to set the strategy of their portfolio. Today’s general productivity tools make it difficult for companies to track and make changes and set their product strategy to adapt to the changing market needs in an agile and efficient way.

In our continued commitment to bringing product managers and product marketing researchers competitive analysis spaces, today, we are happy to announce that you can import competitive products and features, including options, into the Gocious central library.  You can use competitive product records to create competitive dashboards to compare competitive products side by side with yours. 

We are super excited to announce our latest capability for product managers to enhance their product scoring capability and define product specifications more accurately. With the introduction of equations, product teams can define specifications that can result from calculations based on features on the product.

We announced the availability of competitive analysis space and a repository to store and maintain competitive product data as the first of many capabilities we plan to introduce in this space. Today, we are happy to announce the general availability of product scoring in the competitive analysis space. With this new exciting feature, product teams can now analyze their products side by side with competition and have a quantitative way to visualize their product against competing alternatives.

Organizations with many products or variants need a way to organize their team and products to be easily managed and analyzed. Using the Gocious platform, you can organize your products into product lines. Today we are happy to announce that, in addition, you can now group your product lines under different categories. With categories, you can view all your product line changes and launch roadmap grouped by category.