More than 500 product development professionals participated in a global survey on the state of product portfolio management in Europe. The outcome is the Fourth Product Portfolio Management Benchmark Study which provides product development executives key trends into the priorities, risks, and pain points as well as perspective into how they compare to their peers.
After the initial report published, we elected to take a deeper dive into the results by region and found there are few notable differences between product portfolio management (PPM) maturity levels when comparing the complete dataset versus the sample from Europe (European respondents=127).
While overall, organizations are dealing with “not having enough resources”, European organizations are battling more on the innovation front and struggle with “not innovating fast enough”.
When it comes to the top risks experienced by European organizations “unclear priorities when business conditions change” is not found in the “all respondents” dataset list. Comparatively, the Europe dataset also struggles with “missing the voice of the customer” and meeting “time to market”, similar to the all respondents dataset.
Another noteworthy statistic we found was that 70% of respondents from Europe said that they do not kill products early enough in the commercialization process, as compared with 54% surveyed overall. This is a significant difference and is interesting because it seems that product leaders want to have a pipeline for continuous innovation, but they find it problematic to kill products early or often to ensure that resources are allocated to the most promising products. Some common reasons given for not killing products early were: kill criteria are unclear and a lack of rigor in determining the highest return/highest value products.
What is apparent is that most organizations struggle with similar pain points and risks around the over-arching challenge of speeding innovation. Organizations face an ever-tightening grip of market pressures in delivering timely products and innovation to the market with limited resources. Those that focus on developing their product portfolio management processes, people, and tools to manage the innovation process do show improvement and positive shifts in pain points and risks.
If you are feeling these pain points, rest assured that you are not alone. Do you find these risks and pain points resonate with you? Please share by leaving a comment below. I also encourage you to download the full report to dive deeper into this topic.
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