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Introducing New Plan Templates and Task Management Features
At Gocious, we’re committed to creating an all-in-one solution for strategic portfolio management. With our latest updates, including plan templates and comprehensive task management features, we’re closing the gap toward a complete Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) tool that empowers product managers to connect siloed areas, manage tasks across the lifecycle, and streamline their strategic planning. Here’s how these new features work and how they can benefit your teams.
Bringing Structure and Customization to Your Plans: Plan Templates and Properties
Feature Overview
With our new plan templates and properties, product teams can now standardize and customize the information captured at the plan level, enabling seamless management of essential data across the lifecycle. Each plan includes Plan Properties, a flexible set of attributes such as status, release risk, financial metrics, and customer information, giving you control over what’s necessary for successful tracking and reporting.
Customizable Plan Attributes
Quickly access crucial data such as financial projections, customer insights, weighted scoring, and days to deliver by configuring these attributes. In addition to the standard plan properties, we’ve also added the ability to add custom properties to match your organization's needs.
Pull from our attribute library to define the exact information needed for your product planning, whether it’s Net Present Value (NPV), Internal Rate of Return (IRR), or WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First) scoring.
The Key Benefits of Custom Plan Templates
Save Time with Tailored Templates
Pre-configured templates in Gocious allow product teams to bypass the repetitive task of setting up a new plan. Instead of starting from scratch, teams can now use customized templates with relevant fields and attributes already in place. This reduces the time spent on administrative tasks, allowing product managers to set up plans aligned with their specific project needs quickly. Having a standardized yet flexible structure, Gocious helps teams stay organized, focus more on strategic planning, and accelerate time-to-market.
Keep Everyone Informed
With shared information, Gocious promotes transparency across product teams, ensuring everyone can access the latest updates and insights. These custom plan properties offer a consistent view of critical details, such as status, release risk, financial metrics, and customer requirements.
Stakeholders, from executives to team members, can stay aligned on product progress, making it easier to address potential issues or risks early. This centralized information also keeps relevant parties informed, minimizing miscommunication and fostering a data-driven approach to decision-making.
Boost Collaboration
The centralized information in Gocious serves as a collaborative hub for all product stakeholders, including product managers, financial analysts, and engineering teams. By bringing data and updates into one accessible platform, Gocious eliminates the need for spreadsheets or disconnected tracking tools.
Having shared visibility helps all stakeholders understand the bigger picture, leading to smoother cross-functional collaboration. Teams can coordinate more effectively, address concerns quickly, and work together towards common goals. These features drive a more cohesive and productive product management process.
How Custom Plan Templates Work
At the plan level, you can now create templates that specify the data required for each product plan. This customization makes it easy to capture information specific to your company’s needs, blending standard fields with custom attributes pulled from your attribute library within the Gocious platform. It’s similar to the capability customization feature you’re familiar with, enabling you to customize each plan with financial data, days to deliver, ranking criteria, and more.
Introducing Task Management for Plans and Capabilities:
A Critical Step Toward Bridging the Project Management Gap
With the introduction of task management, Gocious now enables users to manage tasks directly within both Plans and Capabilities, bridging the gap between product and project management. This feature adds the power to assign, track, and document tasks within each stage of your Stage-Gate or Hybrid planning systems.
Feature Overview
Assign Tasks at the Plan and Capability Levels
With our new task management feature, users can now assign tasks seamlessly within both the Plan and Capability levels. This update allows product managers to break down complex projects into actionable steps, all directly within the strategic planning environment.
Whether at a high-level product plan or a specific capability (like a new feature or update), tasks can be assigned to individual owners and given due dates to ensure accountability. This integration makes it easier to monitor progress and move projects forward, especially in complex portfolios with many interdependent parts.
Detailed Task Information
Each task within Gocious includes a variety of fields to capture essential information. Users can specify a task name, comments, start date, due date, and owner, giving teams all the context they need to manage tasks effectively. This level of detail helps avoid miscommunication and ensures everyone knows the requirements, deadlines, and responsible parties for each task.
By managing these details within Gocious, teams can keep track of important action items related to their product strategy, contributing to more organized and efficient project execution.
Collaborative Insights
The task management feature also provides a collaborative space where users can tag team members and add comments on specific tasks. This allows for real-time collaboration directly within Gocious, eliminating the need for separate communication tools or spreadsheets.
Having a central location to discuss tasks, provide updates, or troubleshoot issues, team members can quickly identify and resolve issues. This increases transparency across the team, promoting a more connected workflow.
Use Cases
For manufacturers utilizing Stage-Gate or SAFe methodologies, tasks are an effective way to manage the process efficiently. Whether it’s ensuring a specific product capability (e.g., "battery life must last 12 hours") or managing broader project plans, task management helps keep teams on track throughout each phase of development.
How to Access These Features
Both of these updates are available to all Gocious users and can be accessed directly at both the Plan and Capabilities levels. This allows flexibility in managing tasks according to your project’s unique scope and goals, whether for a single product or across your product portfolio.
What’s Next in Development?
Looking ahead, we’re excited to introduce even more functionality for task management, including task grouping and reusable task templates. Soon, you’ll be able to create sets of tasks that can be saved and applied across multiple products or stages, along with checklists for each task to ensure completion accuracy. This expansion of task management will bring further efficiency to product planning, helping us continue to deliver the best all-in-one solution for strategic product portfolio management.
Take Your Product Management to the Next Level
With these latest updates, Gocious dynamic product roadmaps is here to support your journey in creating and managing successful product portfolios. Start using the new features today to streamline strategic planning and collaborate with your teams more effectively. Or, schedule your free demo with the Gocious all-in-one solution for complete product lifecycle management to determine how we can impact your process.