Product portfolio management

A Product Manager's perspective on how to automate roadmap and the product portfolio

1. Product Portfolio Management
Neil Gehani - Sr. Product Manager, LinkedIn
@GehaniNeil

2. Agenda
•What is Product Management
•Product Manager’s Daily “Dashboard”
•Core team structure
•Product Portfolio Management
•Example product portfolio
•Automating PM tasks
•Q&A

4. Product Manager’s “Dashboard”
•Deliver drop dead simple to use products
•KPI’s - Measure and analyze for success
•Track revenue, value, cost, problems
•Adapt to change and re-prioritize
•Ship - fast! so you can learn - iterate, iterate, iterate
•Communicate - roadmap, resource allocation, status

5. Building Products - Process

6. Product and UI
•Product - “It’s not up to customers to tell you what they want, it is up
to you to figure out what they need” - Steve Jobs
•IX/PM - “I am not a chef but I am a pretty good judge of what is a
good meal” - Barney Frank (D-MA former congressman)

7. Core Team Structure
•Product
•Front end (small company) - PM, UI, Eng lead or mgr
•PM & IX = same person
•Front end (big company) - PM, UI, IX, Eng lead or mgr, PMM
•Backend (small company) - PM, Eng lead, Developer Relations
•PM & Dev Relations = same person
•Backend (big company) - PM, Eng lead, Development Relations, PMM

8. Product Portfolio
•Single product
•Multi product
Source: David Etheridge, VP, Yahoo

9. Example Multi Product Portfolio
Data Access Layer
DATABASE IO
REPORTING
ALERTING
MONITORING
LOGGINGAUTHN/Z
3rd Party Apps
Product AProduct BProduct CProduct DProduct E
Architecture & Technology Frameworks
Products - Standardized UX/UI
INTEGRATIONAPI & Libraries Rest / Adapters
PLATFORM
CACHING

10. Scaling Development
•Implementing software development best practices
•Become efficient as a software development org - automate
•Common Design and Scalable Architecture
•Common security procedures
•Common backup infrastructure
•Contributing to common libraries to support code reuse
•Common approach to instrumenting for analytics, monitoring, logging

11. Product X Product Y Product Z
Identify non-core products
And dump them - fast!

12. Documentation framework
•Product documentation
•Name (easily marketable)
•What it is/does? 1 line description in 10 words or less
•One page product brief (like a press release) - link to full product
requirements - “working backwards” - Ian McAllister (amazon.com)
•Requirements doc (wiki)- Explains the what, why, users/activity,
stakeholders
•Link to technical design doc (wiki) - Explains the how

13. Product Portfolio Management
•Ship cool products at an ever faster cadence
•Consolidate product, platform, technology stack
•Automate Roadmap
•Prioritize including what-if
•Resource and skills mapping including what-if
•Schedule
•Tracking status
•Full transparency

14. Prioritization and backlog grooming

15. Prioritization cont’d
Source

16. Automating PM tasks - how?
•Connect business goals to business realities
•Establish a single source of truth - JIRA
•Automate the planning & communication process - JIRA portfolio
management

17. Leverage JIRA and Confluence (wiki)
Source: David Etheridge VP @Yahoo

18. JIRA Product Portfolio Management
Source: Atlassian

19. Identifying resource needs

20. Tracking Status

21. Skills Mapping

22. Skills Matching

23. Sprints Tracking

24. Summary
•Product Management is hard!
•Managing a product portfolio has lots of moving parts
•Identify a single source of truth for data (e.g. JIRA)
•Transparency is key - everyone should see the impact of changes

25. Thank You!
@GehaniNeil
neilgehani.me
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