An integrated approach to product management will increase collaboration between team members, data and software systems. Doing this helps to lower the risk of a product failure, while raising your teams efficiency and reducing your organizations time to market.

As a product manager, you go through many communication channels to understand your market's needs and define the future product. You collect the information, formulate the product, and complete the product plan, representing many days and months of work. The work doesn't stop there though! Once the product is defined, the product managers face the challenge of communicating the product plan with the broader organization and keeping everyone informed of any changes.

At Gocious, we realize that providing easy access to a central repository, where your stakeholders can get the information they need, about the product's future with a click of a button is essential. From leadership to marketing and engineering, many stakeholders need to always have ready access to the product information without the need or fear of making adverse changes to the product plans.

Now with Gocious, you can invite your stakeholders into your workspace as a viewer. The viewer role allows the user to view the product configurations, features, and reports. They can also export reports in PDF and Excel. However, they would not be able to edit or change any information in the system.

We are excited to announce that we now provide unlimited viewer roles free as part of our Portfolio+ offering subscription.

The success of product teams can boost the performance of a business. Providing the capability to enable and speed up communication provides a powerful way to align the organization and receive valuable feedback from all parts of the company.

Get started with our free trial and boost your product communication power.

Our previous article, we explained how Gocious' Weighted Product Score can help you determine how well your product meets market and business constraints. With our new release, you can now identify how specifications are impacting your overall product score. With this new feature, you can detect and address underperforming specifications to improve your overall product fit.

We are excited to introduce the Change Report into the Gocious product portfolio management solution.  The Change report is a feature that enables the comparison of product line plan versions and increments to gain visibility into what has changed from one to the other, with just a click of a button.

Doing an analysis on your competitive products is essential to making sure your planned products have the best chance of success in the marketplace. You must identify your strategic advantage and leave the competition in the rear-view mirror.

Creating your product line on a digital platform at first seems easy. You open a spreadsheet, create a column for each product, add features on rows, and specify whether the features are standard, optional, or unavailable in the cells. Seems straightforward until relationships become complex, products and features grow in quantity, and more importantly, you need to analyze different scenarios. That’s where Gocious makes a difference. With Gocious, you can create product lines fast, re-use features from a central library, configure complex relationships with ease, and now copy a product and make changes to create a new product in the same line. With this capability, you can copy all the product definitions, including features and their configuration, instead of starting from scratch. 

Here at Gocious, we realize how significant the value of a brand is to our customers. A company brand brings more credibility and marketing leverage and brings a sense of pride, ownership, and belonging. Not to mention, branding your space gets you out of trouble with the marketing and branding team! 

Do you use weighted scoring today to make product and feature decisions?  Do you use your own scoring model?  or a simple Pugh analysis? How do you factor in innate bias in the decision-making process of what products and features to build?

Deciding on what products and features to offer to the market requires an understanding of your business and customer needs. At times, you need to strike a balance between multiple factors to come up with a product that best meets those needs. However, the factors requiring consideration are often competing with each other.

To meet your customers' demands as a discrete manufacturer, you need to create a product line with various products and options with many possible configurations. Designing your product line for your customers in a way that is not confusing and in the same time meets their personalization needs can be a challenge. Visualizing entire product lines is a way to ensure it is serving the market needs and is easy to understand from a customer's perspective. It is also an essential tool to strategically communicate what is being built and how it serves the market, enabling everyone inside the organization to stay aligned and informed.