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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.
When planning a line of products , it is important to be able to communicate the various features and options and how they change over time. Doing this in an easy, fast way increases transparency in your organization and will save your team a lot of time.
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Evolving products overtime
Introducing new products to market is an iterative process by nature. Current products go through improvements as technology advances, and new products are added to the mix to satisfy new market segments.
With the Change Report, product teams can easily surface changes to a complex product line, facilitating easier collaboration on and validation of product plans as they evolve.
To illustrate the feature, imagine you have recently launched a laptop line in March for the executive market. To test the market, you have issued two models, ExecXAlt-1 and ExecXAlt-2. ExecXAlt-1 is for less mobile executives and is more cost-conscious, while ExecXAlt-2 is for the more mobile executive that requires lighter weight and higher battery life.
After receiving feedback from the market, you realize that two types of executives use ExecXAlt-2: executives who want medium-cost solutions and executives who travel most of the time with a backpack and work while waiting in airports. The executives that are always on the run require a lightweight laptop with little concern for the cost. So, you decide to introduce a new product specifically for the latter segment.
You also realize that there are issues with the B300 battery for users with X250 or X300 processors and 32 GB memories, so you exclude B300 from those configurations. Your new configuration will be in effect from July 14 of this year.
Introducing change tracking report
Users can now easily compare the two plans side-by-side using one report. You can now clearly see that ExecXAlt-3 has been added, and the 32 GB will not be available.
Working with R&D, you engineer a new battery with less cost and solve the incompatibility with the processor and memory combinations. You decide to switch the new B300V2 with B300.
You capture and reflect this in your new plan, slated to launch in October. You send a notice to your team with a link to the latest change report that shows the changes in one simple visual.
Your team members can clearly see the changes, including the battery's substitution and improvements in the product score, resulting from optimizing the product line. By making B180 and B150 unavailable on ExecAltX-2 and ExecAlt-3, you reduce the buildable combinations, which reduces complexity and makes the product more relevant to the needs of the specific customer profile.
Verifying changes on the roadmap
Now see the summary of changes from one iteration to the other.
You review and validate the timelines for your laptop configuration roadmap and the changes in the features and products between milestones on one chart.
Conclusion
The ability to incrementally plan changes to the configuration and communicate them with the rest of the organization using simple to understand visualizations is quite powerful; it helps to align teams around one common product definition.
With the Change Report, your team can quickly realize the changes between different plans instead of switching from one to the other to identify what has changed.
Using Gocious to configure and make changes to your product configuration is simple. But what makes it even more exciting is that highlighting changes like this requires no manual work or validation.
You can try Gocious for yourself free for 30 days here.