How Gocious Goes Beyond Product Roadmap Management

Guiding a product from the drawing board to the marketplace requires a full-team effort, one in which everyone in the organization is working with the same information and aligned to the same goals. Historically, manufacturers and software development companies have coordinated this kind of product development using a product roadmap. However, while traditional product roadmap management software can be helpful, it’s also limited. Typically, product roadmap management software focuses on projects over products, meaning the emphasis is on individual tasks as opposed to the overall, bottom-line effect of the fully-realized product. Additionally, traditional product management software fails to account for full product portfolios, and for how multiple components work together. 

What Gocious offers is something much more elevated; it’s the most robust and visionary PRM program on the market today, and it’s especially targeted to the needs of manufacturers. Learn more about the benefits of choosing Gocious. 

Gocious Goes Beyond Conventional Product Roadmap Management 

 Guiding a product from its initial inception to the marketplace requires a coordinated, company-wide effort. Everyone from the product development team to sales, marketing, and finance executives needs to be on the same page regarding the product’s progression and its ultimate goals. In recent years, more and more manufacturers have sought to streamline this collaborative process, keeping all stakeholders on the same page via a concept known as the product roadmap. 

In essence, a product roadmap simply provides a high-level summary, mapping out the vision and direction for the product in question. Historically, the most common way to develop a product roadmap has been to use Excel or a comparable spreadsheet program, inviting everyone within the organization to track changes and add their own input. 

But while a product roadmap can certainly be useful for keeping product development on schedule, and for ensuring that all stakeholders are working with a consistent set of data points, traditional product roadmap software can also be quite limited. Most notably, traditional product roadmap management fails to denote how product development aligns with revenue and other important, bottom-line metrics. 

Enter Gocious, a company offering the next evolution in product roadmap management. The Gocious platform provides a sophisticated way to keep product development intertwined with overall business strategy. Indeed, it may be more accurate to say that Gocious goes beyond conventional product roadmap management; it offers a new and elevated way to align product development with overall business strategy, and is especially well-suited for companies in the manufacturing space. 

What is Product Roadmap Management (PRM)? 

 Make no mistake: Limited though it may be, the traditional approach to product roadmap management has its place. 

If you’re part of a manufacturing organization, and if that organization is developing a new product (or even a new line of products), it stands to reason that everyone within the organization will be involved somehow. The actual product development team is tasked with engineering and fine-tuning the product, but the sales and marketing teams have a stake in how that product will be presented to the general public.  

Even people outside of the organization may have a stake in how the product is developed. For example, suppliers and distributors both need to know the basic timeline for the product’s completion, ensuring they are ready to do their part; if the product is delayed for any reason, or if the timeline is moved forward, that’s something these external partners need to know about. 

A product roadmap puts relevant information about the product into a centralized place so that all of these different parties can be aligned and in-the-know about the product’s development cycle. A product roadmap helps everyone in the organization track changes and understand how these changes affect them. For example, if there is a delay with a major supplier, it may set back the marketing department’s timeline. A product roadmap will demonstrate this. 

And, while there are several ways to develop and implement a product roadmap, the most efficient option is to automate the process via a product roadmap management software solution. 

With product roadmap management software, all internal stakeholders will immediately have knowledge about any big changes, such as supply chain disruptions or unexpected shipping delays. Moreover, everyone in the organization will always be working from the same shared, consistent set of data, which can reduce errors and redundancies. 

Going Beyond Traditional Product Roadmap Management 

 While product roadmap management can be useful for shepherding a specific product to market, it’s less effective for businesses looking to manage an entire product portfolio; and, it’s very restricted in how well it reflects or informs broader business goals, including revenue. 

That’s where Gocious enters the picture, offering an elevated take on product roadmap management. Gocious’ take on product roadmap software is designed to address some of the unique concerns that manufacturers face, including concerns that aren’t adequately addressed by competitors in the PRM space. 

For example, most manufacturers need to guide the development not just of one product, but of multiple product lines. Their products may look different from one market to the next. A BMW that’s sold in the USA will involve different manufacturers and distributors than a BMW sold in Germany; it may also need to meet different environmental regulations. Such concerns are much less common in software development, where the product tends to be basically the same no matter where in the world you download it from. 

Additionally, manufacturers are ultimately concerned with much more than just getting a product to market. The ultimate goal is to boost revenue; conventional PRM software doesn’t quite account for that, but Gocious does. The Gocious platform gives stakeholders all the information they need about how different product lines are affecting overall business strategy, and vice versa. 

For example, with Gocious, manufacturers can use the roadmap to identify gaps and determine whether they need to alter their product strategy in order to meet business goals. Achieving the desired level of revenue may require them to move to a cheaper or more expedient supplier, or to introduce the product with slightly different features to new markets. They may also need to reduce cost by increasing reuse of key features and modules which they can identify and apply across the portfolio. Essentially, the Gocious approach to PRM involves developing a growth strategy based in reality, and developing an approach to products that is guided by collaboration, visualization, and business analytics. 

The Gocious Approach to Product Roadmap Management 

 To summarize, there are a number of specific functions that set Gocious apart from other products: 

• Gocious is designed to help your organization manage an entire product portfolio, not just individual products. To return to our BMW illustration, Gocious isn’t just about helping to manage a BMW X1, but rather the entire catalog of BMW vehicles. And, Gocious’ platform can help your team pinpoint ways in which issues with one product affect others in the portfolio. This is beyond what traditional PRM can do.
  
  
• Gocious is also designed to manage different market or brand differentiators. Again, think about different suppliers used in different countries, different regulatory environments, etc. Traditional PRM doesn’t do this. 
  
  

• Gocious tracks the deployment and evolution of modules and their application throughout the product lifecycle, including past the product’s launch. Persona roadmaps demonstrate a systemic view of the benefits customers receive over time. By contrast, other PRM solutions only track a product up to deployment. 
  
  
• Finally, Gocious is designed to help organizations align product development with their business goals. It facilitates helpful conversations about how to lower emissions, enter a new market, or simply expand the company’s sales, to name just a few examples. 

Explore Product Roadmap Management Software from Gocious 

 Ready to find out more about Gocious’ product roadmap management software solutions, and about how they make great strategic sense for manufacturers? We’d love to talk, and to help you ascertain whether Gocious is the right fit for your organization. Contact our team today.