Responsive Product Portfolio Management
Responsive Product Portfolio Management (RPPM) connects objectives, products and resources with execution, and it responsively adapts to the state of the organization and the market.
In contrast to the Traditional Project Portfolio Management, Responsive PPM focuses on continuously evolving products, allowing portfolio leaders to adapt and adjust in real-time to best deliver customer delight and business outcomes.
RPPM doesnt treat product roadmap as a list of project, instead they focus initiatives to achieve desired outcomes by assessing market needs regularly, continuously evolving products, stay responsive to market changing and emerging opportunities.
Focuses vs Goals vs Prioritization?
80% of product teams struggle with competing priorities
90% of teams dependent on other teams to achieve their goals
Every company determines their focus, short and long term goals after a couple of meetings with different stakeholders as well as top level management in the company. When it comes to prioritization generally below traditional models are applied;
- MoSCoW prioritization
- Kano model
- The relative weighting method
- Opportunity Scoring
- Stack Ranking
- Priority Poker
- Cost of Delay
- 100 Dollar Test
Do all those methods work fine?
Responsive PPM was born out of more than 10 million hours of portfolio roadmaps at companies like PayPal, Shutterfly and fast growing startups. Leading companies such as Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, also practice the principles of Responsive PPM.
There are 5 generally accepted principals for RPPM
1- Multiple Perspective Review
A product portfolio generation needs to take into account from different perspectives.
- Customer dimension: New, existing, SME, Large Enterprises, In-house, partners, etc.
- OKR dimension: Grow with new clients, keep existing clients, Innovation, R&D Projects, operational excellence, cost-cutting operations, etc.
- Engineering dimension: How the solution will be completed, resource and time usage, maintenance, etc.
2-Short/Mid and Long term Targets
Every organization has long and short-term focuses at different level at the chain of command
- Weekly: Teams — task/stories
- Monthly: Directors — Features
- Quarterly: Managers — Projects
- Yearly: Executives — Initiatives
Responsive Product & Portfolio Managers set up strategic connections between all levels to make sure the company is aligned with targets and all levels are informed well between each other and be ready for every change in case of need.
3- Strategy & Execution Cycle of RPPM
The journey starts with Market input and ends with “go to market” finalization. During this process, the strategy and execution cycle is run with the iterative.
With a given market input -> Strategic cycle starts with aligning goals, defining strategy and determining to make things ready for the execution part. The output of this cycle provides the guide in order to make the product ready for the execution part. Each cycle has a different time horizon such as annual and quarterly focus.
4- MoAR Prioritization
Metrics + Available resource = MoAR
The metrics on Available Resources (MoAR) model allows teams to connect benefits (return) directly to the goals the product initiative is connected with.
ROI > Cost vs Benefit calculation works better. So RPPMs can prioritize and allocate product investment according to given engineering resources to meet the targets. (“Move the needle”)
5 Responsively Adjust Allocation
Traditional PPMs have a budget thats allocated to a Project. So generally budget is always finished when the project is done.
RPPM measures initiative success based on the outcome during the progress. In case the initiative achieves its goal then, resources can be freed up and ready for another initiative toward the most important areas.
