Product portfolio management involves managing multiple products and prioritizing them. It is important to identify a single source of truth for product data, typically a tool like JIRA. This allows automating tasks like planning, tracking status, and identifying resource needs. It provides transparency by letting all stakeholders see changes and their impact. Managing a product portfolio well requires consolidating products, platforms, skills mapping, and automating as many processes as possible to handle the complexities involved.

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
DATABASEIO
REPORTING
ALERTING
MONITORING
LOGGING
AUTHN/Z
3rdPartyApps
ProductA
ProductB
ProductC
ProductD
ProductE
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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