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Does this sound familiar? Your team rolls out a plan for a software update, only to find it includes discontinued products or features that aren't launch-ready. Even well-aligned teams can struggle when vital lifecycle details are hidden away in their product management tools. Miscommunication happens—especially when product data isn't easily accessible to everyone who needs it.
At Gocious, we've added a new roadmap to our product roadmap software that makes it easier to see the lifecycle of all your products in one central location. This new view will help reduce miscommunication and the mistakes that accompany it. We're introducing the Product Lifecycle Roadmap, the latest offering in our growing suite of dynamic roadmaps.
What Is the Product Lifecycle Roadmap?
The Product Lifecycle Roadmap is designed to increase transparency in your product portfolio. With this new roadmap, your teams can quickly gain a 360-degree view of all products within your portfolio in one easy-to-navigate dashboard. Each product displays its start and end date and the plans that impact it, whether it's a launch plan or a product update.
Unlock the Benefits of the Product Lifecycle Roadmap
The Product Lifecycle Roadmap was built with one goal in mind: to help manufacturers improve transparency and alignment across their entire organization. Centralizing product lifecycle data minimizes miscommunication and prevents the costly errors that result from misaligned teams.
With everything in one place, your teams will save time, avoid frustration, and focus on what really matters—building great products. Here’s how the Product Lifecycle Roadmap can make a difference for you:
Clear Start and End Dates: All product lifecycle roadmaps display the start and end date (if known) by using blue brackets on the timeline. Teams can see at a glance if their plan can use a particular product or not simply by whether the dates fall within the brackets.
Review All Product Plans in One Dashboard: Each product displays a roadmap containing all the corresponding plans listed. Product managers can quickly review which plans are assigned to each product, spotting opportunities and gaps in innovation.
Receive Automatic Alerts: Gocious sends automatic alerts when important information is missed. For example, when a release plan is added to a product without a start date, you will see an alert to remind managers to add one in. Another example is when a new plan includes a product, but its start date falls after its end date. This event would trigger an alert.
Increasing Transparency in Your Organization
Product Lifecycle Roadmaps allow your teams to see the lifecycle of all products in the portfolio in one location, keeping teams aligned and production schedules transparent. Users can even drill down further to see the details of each plan just by clicking on it. A slider screen shows the dates of that plan, the scope involved, and other products affected.
The Lifecycle Roadmap display allows all stakeholders to see where a product is used by different plans to avoid conflict in schedules. For example, a particular model of a laptop may have several plans associated with it, including a launch plan in year one, a software update in year two, and a hardware update in year three. Knowing the schedule for these plans prevents overlap or conflicting plans from happening.
With our Product Lifecycle Roadmap, we've also made it easy to see how and when a plan will impact the product or not. A diamond tag indicates the impact each time a plan includes the product. The plan will impact the product if a letter appears within the diamond tag. An "I" indicates the first time the product is introduced to the market, a "C" indicates that a change is planned, and an empty diamond means no change will occur.
Improving Alignment Across Your Teams
Product Lifecycle Roadmaps make it easy for your teams to spot problems when plans fall outside the product's lifecycle. This means teams can instantly see when they can include a product in their plan or not. Fewer mistakes in product planning mean fewer last-minute corrections or costly changes to plans.
In this regard, the Product Lifecycle Roadmap feature makes product meetings more efficient by keeping all stakeholders informed with the same, up-to-date information. Product teams can be more productive and strategic with planning because everyone can access accurate data. The use of Product Lifecycle Roadmaps alongside Feature Lifecycle Roadmaps dramatically improves product planning and development processes.
The ability to click on a product name within the roadmap and instantly access key details—such as descriptions, images, activity, and comments—enables users to quickly distinguish between multiple products with just a click.
Product Lifecycle Roadmaps Help Your Teams Make Better Product Decisions.
At Gocious, we help manufacturing organizations empower their teams with unified product roadmap software. The new Product Lifecycle Roadmap is the latest feature in our roadmap capabilities and is designed to give your teams greater transparency and alignment. Schedule a demo with our team today to see Gocious in action and unlock the data in your product roadmaps.