Every year, innovation brings new and improved products to life, making many amazing and brilliant things available to us, from advanced electronic systems to fuel-efficient or electric vehicles to AI technology, making the dangerous industries safer for humans.
The day-to-day experiences of product management roles have similarities between industries. There needs to be a product vision established, a development plan laid out, and a strategy to manage it all must be created.
What if you could conjure up a new car with the snap of your fingers? Or create the latest smartphone with the tap of a button? That is the kind of efficiency that people dream of, but since technology isn't quite there yet, manufacturers still rely on product managers to help bring these products to life as efficiently as possible.
Product roadmaps are a great way to keep track of your company's progress towards designing, building, and releasing new products to the market. A product roadmap creates a space where you can set goals, track performance, and make decisions for future development. When you have a plan to look over each product and product line, you'll be able to spot both the success and trouble spots with more insight and metrics to prove it. The product roadmap also provides a framework for communicating with stakeholders, investors, and marketing teams.
We've established that roadmaps are great for business, but how should a product roadmap be structured? How can a company keep track of multiple products and brands destined for various markets? We've got five simple steps you can use to build any product roadmap, along with an important tip for managing multiple product lines!
Products are becoming more complex, and understanding different market segments and personalizing products for each segment iteratively is on the rise. Providing different variations of the same platform and modules for different market segments is a way to enable personalization. But segments are shifting rapidly in the manufacturing space and keeping up with the pace of change and controlling this complexity requires new ways of working and new tools to support it.
Guiding a product from the drawing board to the marketplace requires a full-team effort, one in which everyone in the organization is working with the same information and aligned to the same goals. Historically, manufacturers and software development companies have coordinated this kind of product development using a product roadmap. However, while traditional product roadmap management software can be helpful, it’s also limited. Typically, product roadmap management software focuses on projects over products, meaning the emphasis is on individual tasks as opposed to the overall, bottom-line effect of the fully-realized product. Additionally, traditional product management software fails to account for full product portfolios, and for how multiple components work together.
What should manufacturers know about developing an effective product roadmap? And what are the best product roadmap software solutions for manufacturers to consider? Get insights in the latest post from Gocious, one of the foremost names in product roadmap management.
When we imagine the process involved in creating a product, most of us imagine making something with our hands. We might also think of large-scale factories with assembly lines made famous by Ford vehicle manufacturing plants. Today, we've moved beyond having only physical products. We also have an entire industry of digital products and software that we never physically hold in our hands, but we interact with using devices and the internet.
Multi-stakeholder processes require collaborations to be effective. Think of your own company and all the different departments and teams involved in developing your products. You have your designers and engineers who create the ideas for the products or the new features that will be integrated. You have the entire production team that covers sourcing materials, manufacturing components, and assembly. Then, there’s the marketing team is in charge of promoting the end product. All these players have significant roles to fill that depend on each other, and no one can complete their work in isolation.
It's no secret that managing product development is a complex process. You may have dozens of team leads or executives to check in with and keep informed. You could be working with one prototype product or managing an entire portfolio of product lines from original models to brand new launches.
