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2 minute read
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.
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Modeling product lines in Gocious
With Gocious product roadmapping software, you can quickly model complex product lines and analyze different scenarios. You can create products and assign features that are mutually exclusive and have dependencies on each other. For example, you can easily define a product such as a car that can have 250 horsepower, 300 horsepower, or 325 horsepower engines as options but not all three of them at the same time. You can then configure a specific transmission that is only available with the 325 horsepower engine and not with 250 horsepower or 300 horsepower engines.
Once you define your features on one product, you can create a new product on the same line, and all the features by default will be marked as optional on the new product -- unless there is an underlying dependency. In the example above, once we set the appropriate engine for each of our products, the transmission options will automatically be updated to reflect the dependency.
With this capability, you will reduce mistakes and speed up adding and validating products and feature configurations.
Cloning products in a product line
You can see now how efficiently you can model product lines and scenarios with Gocious Software. However, it is also common when adding a product to a product line, you would like to copy another product and make slight changes to its description, specifications, or feature set. In these cases, you can now duplicate an entire product in that line and copy all its information, including feature availability. With this capability, instead of all features by default being optional on the product, they will be configured the same as the product that it’s copied from, speeding up configuring the new product.
In Gocious, we are continually looking for ways to improve the accuracy and speed of planning your product portfolio. We realize that small capabilities like this will add up and enable considerable time savings for our customers.
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