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From gas-powered cars to hybrid and electric models, automotive companies offer multiple types of vehicles in their product lines. Product planning is essential to ensure that their offering remains current and relevant in the market. With new technologies on the horizon, product releases must be coordinated to meet the needs of the consumer, and product features redesigned to create innovative automotive options. Product roadmaps help to outline the product development process and plan proactively for the future.
Product Roadmap Software for the Automotive Industry
Automotive product development is complex. A single vehicle often requires hundreds of small components to build a finished product, which makes for a complicated manufacturing process. With components sourced from around the globe, a product manager needs sufficient roadmapping tools to manage the process effectively.
Traditional roadmapping relied on a variety of applications to manage the development process. This included isolated text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations distributed using email. This method of communication was time-consuming and cumbersome and presented problems of version control and outdated information.
Gocious product roadmap management software is designed for the discrete manufacturing industry. It provides several advantages over traditional roadmapping that improves the efficiency of the product development process.
Align the Product Goals With the Company Vision
Does your product portfolio align with your business goals? Your product manager is responsible for defining the company vision and creating products that will allow you to meet the goals of the company.
Relaying the company vision to all your stakeholders is an important task to ensure alignment across your organization. Product roadmaps provide a clear visual guideline, so your production teams understand:
- The vision of the company
- The short, mid, and long-term goals to realize the vision
- A definitive timeline to meet the goals
What Does Your Customer Value?
Understanding your target audience is vital to developing successful products. Knowledge of changes in the market and new technologies is just as valuable. Market research is an important function that will allow you to identify opportunities to meet and exceed expectations in your market. Customer success teams that communicate directly with the consumer provide valuable insights. This helps to give direction to the product strategy and aids in defining the business objectives.
Analytics for Improved Decision-Making
Product alignment should be achieved in all aspects of product development. This includes the creation of new products and existing products within the product line. Gocious Product Roadmap Management Software provides several features that empower product managers to make informed decisions when assessing the product line.
Assess Your Product Line
The Product Walk offers a high-level view of the products within the product portfolio. It highlights the product features of each product along with its capabilities as the product progresses from one to the other.
Specification Reports highlight a range of specifications, such as weight or cost, and conveniently list them side by side for comparison and transparency.
Competitive Analysis Tools allow you to see how your products stack up against the competition. By understanding where your products excel and options for improvement, you can enhance your competitive edge and build more successful products.
The Weighted Scoring is useful to measure how well a product meets a set of targets. This will allow you to analyze product compatibility within the market and assess how closely it meets customer expectations.
Are Your Products Still Relevant?
A fundamental point to be considered when assessing the product line is whether each product is still aligned with the company vision. Goals change over time, so a product that was launched five years ago may no longer be relevant due to a revised company vision.
Assessing your product line includes identifying products that should be modified, discarded from the product line, or new products that should be built. For example, an automobile company that has the goal to produce fully electric vehicles by a specified date may gradually move to limit the production of gas-powered models to comply with the vision.
Roadmaps To Define the Development Process
Automotive manufacturing is complex because of its reliance on multiple components to build a vehicle. Modern-day automobiles are defined by automotive hardware or the physical components of the vehicle and automotive software. Changes in technology dictate that software development is now a key component of automobile manufacturing.
When the development process is vague and ill-defined, this causes confusion for your product teams. Visual roadmaps are a useful tool to outline the product development process. When stakeholders have a clear understanding of the expectations along with specified goals set on a timeline, they can work more effectively to meet those goals.
Product roadmap management software offers the advantage of being able to track the development of all parts of the vehicle. This allows synchronization in development across the organization.
Stay Competitive and Pursue a Growth Strategy
Expand into new markets by personalizing product lines to meet customer and market needs.
The market division feature is particularly relevant to the automotive industry, where products are differentiated according to the market.
It is common to see the same model of car branded differently in Europe and North America, and this feature allows you to define markets and capture product definitions that specifically address those markets.
Determine the variations of your product by outlining the features and capabilities required by each market. This is useful to meet the regulatory and custom needs that often vary by location.
Product Roadmap Management Software for Improved Communication
Improve Transparency for Enhanced Productivity
Communicating with stakeholders is easy with Gocious Product Roadmap Management Software. With all of your data housed on a unified platform, your teams have access to the latest information. From understanding the company vision, tracking the development process, and keeping on top of product goals, your development teams can align their development activities with the aim of meeting your goals.
Collaboration For Improved Performance
Collaborate with all of your product teams, from design and engineering to finance and sales, with roadmap management software that is easy to use.
Provide editing and viewing functions to all of your company stakeholders. This provides the benefit of ensuring that data can be updated and viewed in real time.
Share relevant project information ahead of team meetings. Multiple team members also can work on the same document in real-time, enhancing productivity in team meetings.
Access cloud-based software from any location. This is particularly useful for the automotive industry, which commonly runs operations around the globe.
Product Roadmap Software for the Automotive Industry
Gocious Product Roadmap Management Software is a useful tool for guiding the product development process in the automotive industry. Book your free demo now to see how Gocious can work for you.
