A product portfolio consists a number of portfolio items of varying scope, representing the size of investment.
Each portfolio item may serve multiple needs, e.g. related to customers, business goals, or the product areas. They are called portfolio dimensions in the Responsive Product Portfolio Management framework. Sometimes they are also called strategic pillars, investment perspectives or portfolio meta data. The ability to see these other dimensions allows better prioritization and communication.
This article covers:
- Overview of portfolio dimensions
- Customize / set up portfolio dimensions
- Merging duplicate values
- Dynamic Hierarchies
Overview of portfolio dimensions
There are 7 system defined portfolio dimensions. Most companies start with the top 3.
You may find them on the Portfolio Settings pages. They can all be renamed to fit your organization's terminology.
- Objective is a dimension for business and GTM hierarchy -
- typically maps to goals / OKRs/ outcomes.
- In larger organizations, you may have 2 levels of Objectives, e.g. Portflio goals, and Product Vertical goals.
- Enterprise + or higher account may have dedicated Outcome module to manage current Goals where the setting page is primarily for customization of name only.
- Roadmap is a dimension used for product hierarchy. This varies, depending on the type of organization.
- For a product organization, a Roadmap often refers to a product area/ product line, where sub-roadmap refers to a sub-area of the product.
- For a service organization, a Roadmap may map to a Client or a segment of clients
- For an IT portfolio, a Roadmap may map to the source of Ideas, e.g. a Business Unit, Tech Roadmap
- For a transformation effort, a Roadmap may map to a workstream.
- Timeframe - This can be the Target quarter or Release or Product Increment, or fuzzy time as This Month, This Quarter, Next Quarter.
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Theme - This dimension may be used for product theme or strategic themes (across multiple roadmaps)
- Category - This is another way to group your ideas. Some may use it to illustrate the User Journey, investment category/ horizon, e.g. core, adjacent, new investment.
- Phase - This dimension typically maps to product or software development life cycle.
- Priorities - You can sequence and change order of priority items and add priority as an additional field on Gantt pages and throughout your dashboard.
- Additional Dimensions - Roadmap, Objectives, Timeframe, Theme, Category, and Team have a main selection option, and "Additional” Options (e.g. “additional Roadmaps"). This dimension is visible in the Portfolio Item Lightbox, Portfolio Roadmaps List and PDLC field options, as well as Board and 3D display preferences. You search for and filter data based on the additional fields.
Here are a few examples of how to surface and use the additional portfolio dimensions information on:
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- 3D Dynamic view: add the additional portfolio dimensions to the display preferences on the 3D view:
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- Board view: add the additional portfolio dimensions to the display preferences on the board view:
Best practice - how to best use the multi select and additional goals/ roadmaps for better insights and efficient operations:
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- When to use additional Goals: a portfolio item (typically initiative or higher level) An initiative may have a main goal, and additional goals. For example, an initiative. For example, An initiative has a primary goal to support existing customer expansion revenue, but its secondary goals could be for new sales revenue - the Additional goal can be used to call out new sales revenue and enable search for portfolio items that have both the primary and any specific secondary goals.
- When to use additional Timeframes: if a portfolio item spreads over multiple quarters, use additional quarters fields to identify all quarters and enable view as well as search for all quarters an item spread over.
- Using additional roadmaps for Cross-Functional Collaboration: Teams often work on projects that require collaboration across different departments or functions. You can use additional roadmaps to identify projects that require the support of secondary teams.
- When to use multi-select custom fields: Teams can create a multi-select dropdown custom field to capture all of their target segments, but certain initiatives will impact specific subset of segments that can be easily identified using the new Segment multi-select dropdown custom field.
Customize the naming of portfolio dimensions
Use the account setting page, via Portfolio Data Setting, an admin or owner can
- RENAME the portfolio dimension field itself to reflect the terminologies used in your own organization.
- Example: rename Roadmap to Product area or Business Unit. Rename Category to Customer Segment, rename Theme to Strategic driver etc.
- Add, Update, Merge, Delete / Archive current value.
- By default only admin may add or edit portfolio dimension value
- Enterprise or higher account may request custom permission that also give permission to editors to add or edit some of the portfolio dimensions.
- The value of each portfolio dimension by default is displayed in the same order as they are in the setting page. Change order will change the default global display order.
A new value of may also be created in context, e.g. on the Portfolio board, 3D dynamic page.
Note: To maintain a clean list of data, and to avoid accidentally remove the ones in use, we recommend merging duplicate data, or archive an inactive value, especially around Goals, Releases, and Themes.
Merging duplicate values
To Merge duplicate values:
- Go to the relevant setting page
- Click the Merge icon
- Select the values to merge and click save.
To change the order of values on the settings page determine the order of these values on all other pages.
Dynamic Hierarchy
Dynamic hierarchy can be built real time to view portfolio in different lens / perspective.
For example:
- Group by Roadmap and then Group by Timeframe - provides info about feature planned over time for each product.
- Group by Timeframe and then Group by Roadmap - provides info about features planned for each product within each Timeframe.
TIP: You may also create additional custom fields with Dropdown to define additional lens you need to categorize or manage structured data. Some commonly used custom fields include:
- Funnel stage (for business/ revenue work flow)
- Persona (for items that may affect different persona)
- Plan type (for items mapped to different plans)
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