Just Released: The Feature Release Roadmap

For global manufacturers, developing physical products with intricate cyber-physical features requires significant capital investment and often spans lengthy timelines of 5-10 years. Additionally, hardware product cycles are characterized by deep interdependencies, long lead times, and the constant threat of product feature deprecation. These subassembly modules, which are referenced as features within the Gocious platform, are the integral product subsystems that go into the development and production of a finished product. 

These inherent complexities often create a visibility gap, making it extremely challenging for product managers and their core teams to gain a clear, real-time understanding of their entire product portfolio.

Today, Gocious is proud to announce a new Feature Release Roadmap that seeks to overcome this problem. This roadmap is designed to bridge the visibility gap so manufacturing teams can actively monitor the rise and fall of interconnected features throughout their products’ lifecycles.

Offering a streamlined view of feature assemblies within the Gocious platform, the Feature Release Roadmap is set to revolutionize how product managers achieve visibility, mitigate the unexpected ripple effects of sunsetting features, and ensure launch readiness.

What is the Feature Release Roadmap?

The Feature Release Roadmap introduces a new view for important feature releases within the Gocious platform. The goal of this roadmap is to provide a highly visible timeline of every product feature within your portfolio, illustrating their introduction, planned changes, and eventual deprecation.

Imagine having a clear, visual representation that shows exactly when a specific battery feature was introduced and when it is scheduled to be phased out, all within the context of the products that utilize it. This is the level of visibility the Feature Release Roadmap aims to help you accomplish.

It is important to note that within the Gocious platform, product leaders can also leverage Feature Lifecycle Roadmaps, which display when a specific feature is being changed or updated by plans over time.

What Problem Does the Feature Release Roadmap Solve?

Traditional product roadmaps focus on the overall product lifecycle. However, manufacturing teams face a much bigger challenge: Product managers aren’t just managing product portfolios, they're orchestrating complex ecosystems of hardware features, intricate product features, and third-party dependencies that must work together flawlessly.

Product Feature Example in the Tech Industry

For example, a laptop has a variety of features within it that make up the entire product. Features like the motherboard, battery, cooling system (CPU fan, heat sink, etc.), storage drive, and RAM are all interconnected parts that make up the computer. 

Oftentimes, third parties provide features to the manufacturer of the laptop, but it’s important to note that these third-party suppliers have their own feature lifecycles. One day, the supplier freely offers hard disk drives (HDDs), but the next, they discontinue the HDDs in exchange for faster solid-state drives (SSDs).

Unfortunately, trouble arises when third-party providers quietly announce that they are sunsetting a feature, if they even announce it at all. This leads to a major ripple effect for manufacturers that still rely on that feature for their own product assemblies, as well as their customers, who rely on the final product for their business operations.  

With so many moving parts and the desire for increased visibility of product feature timelines, there is a need for a new approach to feature lifecycle management. This is where the Feature Release Roadmap becomes useful.

How Does the Feature Release Roadmap Work?

Gocious’s new Feature Release Roadmap provides increased visibility into the modular product architecture. Through easy-to-create swim lanes, feature families, and feature cards, Gocious users will be able to set up timelines that display goals and the fine details of each product feature, including the deprecation (sunset) date of one feature and the release date of a new feature.

No More Outdated Feature Manuals

Rather than hunting down an old phone-book style manual that has very little information about the feature in question, the Feature Release Roadmap allows manufacturing teams to write detailed descriptions of each feature:

• Specs
• Code
• Feature history
• Capabilities
• Comment section for users
• Details of who is using the feature
• Image of feature

With the features inserted as their own roadmaps, product managers and their global manufacturing teams will know exactly what to expect and how to successfully pivot when features are changed. It is a real game-changer for module-level product management.

Address Visibility Gaps, Mitigate Risk, & Ensure Launch Readiness

The power of the Feature Release Roadmap lies in its ability to bring disparate information together into a single, cohesive view. The new Gocious Feature Release Roadmap tackles 3 key pain points for manufacturers:

• Third-party dependency risks: When suppliers discontinue certain features, the impact can be massive. Especially for regulated industries like medical devices, where FDA approval is required for new components
• Cross-portfolio feature usage: Understanding which features are shared across products helps avoid costly redundant testing (potentially saving hundreds of thousands per test cycle)
• Launch readiness coordination: Ensuring all components are ready in time across organizational silos, from technology teams developing software solutions to manufacturing teams preparing production lines

Through the Feature Release Roadmap, product managers will be able to sort and select specific feature families, monitor activity through filters such as ‘see all’ and ‘contract all,’ and match customer needs to the right solution through detailed feature cards. 

To easily monitor active features, ‘Active From’ dates have a green marker while ‘Active Until’ dates have a red marker aligned to the right.

Foster Cross-Organizational Alignment

The Feature Release Roadmap is a powerful tool for breaking down organizational silos. In large enterprises, product, engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain teams often operate with fragmented information. This leads to miscommunication and misaligned efforts. The new roadmap provides a single source of truth, offering a unified view of the product portfolio and its underlying features that all stakeholders can access and understand.

This shared visibility fosters increased cross-functional alignment and gives manufacturing teams foresight into their design choices on future products. 

Discover the Feature Release Roadmap with a Custom Demo

The Feature Release Roadmap is a testament to Gocious's unwavering commitment to empowering product managers across manufacturing industries with the tools they need to succeed in increasingly complex ecosystems. This new feature seamlessly integrates with Gocious's broader suite of capabilities, reinforcing its core philosophy of product-centricity.

While numerous product management tools cater to software development, very few effectively address the specific complexities of modularity and lifecycle management inherent in physical product manufacturing. For companies dealing with complex physical products, long development cycles, and intricate supply chains, the ability to track and manage individual module lifecycles is key to success. 

See how Gocious can revolutionize your product portfolio management. Get a free custom demo today!