Successfully managing a Portfolio of Products is much more difficult than it seems from afar. Complexity builds as a Portfolio develops from a single product, driven by increasing levels of dependency between potential product options and the reality that neither markets nor technologies stand still. Learning to master these complexities is therefore a steep and long learning curve.
From our experience leading Product Portfolio activities we know of this learning curve only too well. We also realised there was very little support out there to help master the art of Product Portfolio Management. While there are number of frameworks out there to assist with Project Portfolio Management, the case where Strategy, Marketing, Sales and Operations need to be embedded in the process is missing. We therefore decided to distill our decades of experience managing global product portfolios into a product which we call PORTGENIE.

We developed PORTGENIE with several key aims which we had learned the hard way:

•  A Product Portfolio should be designed to deliver company strategy and not simply evolve.
• Sufficient Portfolio space should be created to allow innovation to thrive.
•  A Product Portfolio needs to track change in the market, competition, technology and progress in its own product development – we have learned that two ‘gears’ are needed to do this tracking.
• Ultimately good decisions are the lifeblood of good portfolio management. Good decisions require holistic clarity of the current state and likely future trends as well as good timing.
• Organisational commitment is built on common ways of working across functions with clear aims.

At its core PORTGENIE enables a company to get better leverage of its business domain specific knowledge and experience without having to expend effort in learning some hard lessons in the art of Product Portfolio Management.