Shaping Strategic Product Portfolios

Benefits of the journey

You will see more of the following benefits with each significant step closer to operating an effective product portfolio:

• Significant cost savings from reduced friction and coordination costs
• More investment focused on the important work, and less on the unimportant
• Dramatically improved ability to steer and change investments
• Less money wasted on building the wrong things
• Comfort reshaping your portfolio in the future without expensive consultants
• Improved visibility and trust into spend and outcomes
• Significant leadership time savings to reinvest in higher-value activities
• More partnership and better relationships between leaders across functions

This three-month journey helps your portfolio leadership team through a significant lift for the portfolio, one typically associated with a significant behavioral lens transition.

Who?

Your portfolio leadership team is the smallest group that can both provide all perspectives and make the necessary hard decisions.

Choose the right people based on the scope and responsibility of the specific portfolio. The level of title will vary, but is likely more senior than you're used to involving in change efforts as roles other than "sponsor".

Typical roles and titles titles might include: 

• CPO, CFO, CRO,  Marketing / sales leaders
• CIO, Key portfolio business leaders, LOB Executives
• VP PMO / VMO, Dir portfolio operations, LACE / WoW leadership
• VP Engineering,
  VP Product
• Enterprise arch, Chief architect

What to expect

The SSPP journey contains 8 modules that each address a different aspect of making a lift to a new lens in your pursuit of operating an effective Product Portfolios.

The modules are generally spaced 1-2 weeks apart. In each module, the leadership team will come together to learn key concepts for that aspect of a lean portfolio, explore insights from how it applies to your own portfolio, consider different interventions based on the insights, and identify additional actions to take place before the next session.  

After each class, there will be actions and homework to further apply the new concepts to your portfolio and explore the implications of the various plays you considered. We'll review the outcomes and learning from the homework together in office hours to refine the ideas, improve understanding of the concepts, and amplify the impact of your upcoming interventions. 

By the end of the 3-months you will have initiated a number of immediate shifts, shaped the path through the next lens lift, and generated the insights, confidence and wisdom required to successfully navigate the required change.

Topics include

The journey's modules cover practice areas like:

• Learning to see where you are, and learn how to talk about where you are
• Recognizing the evolution patterns of portfolios
• Aligning on shared language for your portfolio (without introducing a whole new set of words)
• Identifying your current portfolio state and a shared understanding of "better"
• Recognizing the obligations and expectations that arise across portfolios in a company
• Mapping relationships between aspirations, work, people, systems, and money
• Identifying controls and governance that rely upon and extend from those relationships
• Choosing shifts and sequences that create flow and simplify the journey

The module flow intentionally aligns with the three-day Unlocking Portfolio Impact training, which prepares your change agents to act as guides and support through the journey. More information on UPI is found here.