Your path to business agility
Innovation is all about focusing and optimizing the product portfolio so you can get products to market at the right time and cost. Topics we’ll explore in the Product Innovation blog category range from ideation management to product launch and product end-of-life. Experts will provide recommendations to take your innovation strategy and delivery process to the next level. You’ll get tips for picking the right projects, prioritizing good projects, and aligning them with strategy. Take your innovation strategy to the next level with information on improving time to market to maximize resources, funding, and time. Get tips from other customers on how they improved transparency to pick the right projects and kill the bad projects early. You will also be able to access ground-breaking research and fresh insights on how capacity planning can accelerate business innovation while lowering risk.
When we engage with a client, our primary objective is to ensure that they are investing in the right projects: Those in closest alignment with their strategic goals. Without proper attention paid to project execution, however, you’ll never unlock the potential of your chosen projects. Last year we blogged about the distinctions between operational and...
Coffee Talk: It’s Your Link to the Latest Innovation and Product Portfolio Management News and Trends! We are excited to introduce this new video blog series, Coffee Talk, featuring the Product Portfolio Mavens. Likened to The View for Product Portfolio Management (PPM), the Mavens offer wise insights along with a fun perspective on critical topics for...
As we have said before, every forecast you’ll ever build is wrong. The truth may be out there, but due to a lack of perfect information about the future, you won’t be able to reveal it before your project review meeting. There is a paradox here: The more you insist on the truth, the more...
What is an R&D-driven company with $10-50 billion of cash in the bank to do? In the last twelve months, Merck, Pfizer, HP, AstraZeneca, and Bristol-Myers Squibb have announced stock buybacks totaling over $25 billion, and layoffs of over 30,000 employees. So apparently, for many firms, the best use of their cash hoard is a...
Finance and R&D can get along You’ve just finished briefing the executive committee on the methods for project valuation that you have worked so hard to establish in your R&D group. The team has finally acknowledged that risk needs to be managed in all its potential forms. You’ve reached consensus on the following set of...
Innovation is inherently risky. By definition, you’re doing something that you haven’t done before so there are no guarantees it will work. The mindset in many organizations is to “minimize” risk as if it were a disease, but it isn’t that simple. The best companies face risk head-on and manage it both systematically and transparently....
A Look at the Findings from the 3rd Product Portfolio Management Benchmark Study: Companies are Waking Up to Ways to Streamline Product Development This year, 320 product development executives and managers across the globe shared their priorities, risks, and pain points around product portfolio management (PPM). Because this is the third study on PPM, we were...
Detailed project valuations are often requested by executives, the basis being they will feel more confident in their decision making process if the accuracy of the forecasts is increased They might believe that adding detail to their valuations can accomplish this; however, this is inevitably not the case (All the NPVs are wrong, can we...
Another striking—and often underappreciated—aspect of [Steve] Jobs’ success was his ability to say no. At a company like Apple, thousands of ideas bubble up each year for new products and services that it could launch. The hardest thing for its leader is to decide which ones merit attention. Mr Jobs had an uncanny knack of...
Is it appropriate for product-based organizations to make improvised decisions when they don’t have visibility or access to proper data or metrics? Do product leaders have the resources for priority projects to drive innovation and growth? Is it possible that underperforming projects continue to consume precious resources? According to the industry’s third Product Portfolio Management...
