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.
The role of a product manager is a rewarding one, even if it's not always glamorous. You're busy balancing the opinions and priorities of different departments, trying to keep everyone on the same page while maintaining ambitious timelines. Still, despite these challenges, seeing a new product or variation on a feature launch into the real world from the ideation stage to the sitting-on-a-shelf stage is incredibly satisfying.
There are plenty of product roadmap tools out there today. Still, our research has shown there is a clear need to improve product roadmaps to ensure teams of teams are aligned, the entire portfolio meets strategic business objectives, and there is efficiency in re-using components and increasing innovation. Many roadmap platforms today:
Struggle to understand the dependencies of product content across your product teams and your overall organization
Product Management plays a key role inside companies driven by their products; it’s instrumental for organizational growth and strategic market advantages.
The function of product management is evolving within manufacturing companies. Senior leadership is pressing for more growth, more innovation, more diversification, more market expansion. All of this falls in the lap of product management to figure out the path forward. It is more important than ever for product management to revisit the tools in their proverbial toolbox.
Launching a new product can be a bit like a science experiment. You have made observations and created a hypothesis with data that supports your claims. Next, the hypothesis gets approved so you launch the product thus testing it.
Now it ss time to draw conclusions and refine the hypothesis.
But this presents you with a problem. Your original hypothesis data is not the same as that returning from the real world. So what can you do?
