I spoke with a marketing director at a rather large company and he confessed to having 47 browser tabs open to update the product description on the various product pages on his company’s site. This was a few months ago and it stuck with me in part because I was shocked into silence by the number of browser windows he had open and then I spent a bit of time grilling him about how he managed to keep all of those tabs open (turns out it wasn’t as hard as it seemed). My follow up question was to ask if he thought that keeping 47 tabs open to update a single product description on all of the various pages in a product’s portfolio was a good thing. My sense was that he did.
As I mentioned above, When growth gets out of control a company can slowly but surely lose sight of its own products. I have written about this before, but a moment from last year with a marketing director at a growing company has really stuck with me. We were talking about how she and her team updated product descriptions for products on all of a company’s sales channels. I asked her how she did it and she replied matter-of-factly that she had 47 browser tabs open to update everything. The image of 47 tabs has stuck with me, not because of the browser tabs in and of themselves, but because that image makes clear how a growing company can slowly lose sight of its products.
When growth becomes the problem
I wrote this a while back: one of the challenges of a growing portfolio of products is that as a company grows, it becomes increasingly hard for leaders to have a clear view of what is going on with all of the products. Intuitively, one might think that as a company grows and adds more products, there would be more and more information about those products, but in reality the opposite is true. As a company adds more products, the information about those products and the data related to that information can become increasingly complex. The teams required to bring new products to market can grow, and the number of spreadsheets that need to be maintained by already overworked individuals can increase. And, at the end of the day, many of those spreadsheets are not up to date.
Leadership’s decisions are typically made with incomplete information, product timelines are consistently communicated in a fashion that is inconsistent and problematic, risk is tracked in some form of a spreadsheet, that rapidly deteriorates in relevance over time. The point at which the problem is discovered and the significant cost to fixing it, is typically a significant one.
This isn’t a talent problem. It’s a structure problem.
The real cost of not knowing what you have
I try to help people who have many products manage their product portfolio more efficiently. What I actually see is a far more strategic problem for senior leaders in organizations, and that is that such leaders are unable to see their product portfolio clearly, cannot be sure that resources are being put to best use, and in the worst case are driven by whoever is screaming the loudest in the room.
It’s a common problem to have unknowns with products in a portfolio, but especially unknown unknowns (things you don’t even know you don’t know). It’s like driving cross country without even knowing the tire pressure of all your tires. You’ll probably make it, but you’ll surely run into some problems along the way. And with a bit of knowledge about your tires ahead of time you’d avoid those problems altogether.
Some of the worst decisions I have seen companies make are completely uninformed. They have ended up deprioritizing products that are extremely valuable to customers. They have approved launch timelines that were completely unrealistic. They have put their companies in very difficult positions and they have been shocked by how things unfolded.
(And frankly, it’s incredibly frustrating because this is a very fixable problem. Most organizations already have all the pieces they need to make better decisions. They’re just buried, or scattered around in some form, or not being put together in a way that makes sense.)
What good visibility actually looks like
A dashboard filled with 17 or so metrics which nobody actually reads does not provide clarity. It generates data volume which is quite a different thing.
Real portfolio visibility provides clear and timely information to support key decisions. Senior leaders need to know the following to support their work.
- Which products are on track, and which are quietly drifting?
- Where are the risks that haven’t been formally flagged yet?
- How does each product line perform relative to expectations, and relative to each other?
- What’s coming in the next quarter that needs attention now?
Leadership can make decisions with confidence when they have visibility into your product portfolio. Resources are allocated to the greatest potential for return or to mitigate the greatest risk. The team can stop expending 50% of their time and effort reporting out on status and can go back to building products. The entire organization is not blind-sided by something that was technically visible in someone’s spreadsheet the whole time (Most common example: A product’s revenue is going down a lot – but no one put all that information together to get a clear picture).
What Areas Do Most Companies Go Wrong In?
| Visibility gap | What it looks like day-to-day | The downstream effect |
| Timeline tracking across teams | Each team reports progress differently, so rollups are guesswork | Missed launches, misaligned resourcing |
| Risk surfacing | Problems stay buried until they become crises | Reactive decisions made under pressure |
| Performance comparison | Products evaluated in isolation, not against each other | Poor prioritization, resource dilution |
| Executive-level summaries | Leadership gets reports instead of insight | Slow decisions, low confidence in data |
Does software actually solve this?
No.
For a team who are trying to create some executive-level clarity of a growing product portfolio, and really struggling to try and see what’s going on within their product portfolio (beyond the obvious and usual compliance-related items), then a product portfolio visibility platform can save them weeks of work creating out something useful for leadership to use on an ongoing basis, in real-time, in real meetings.
A product that aggregates data (even when centralized and dressed up in a web based interface) is essentially noise, as opposed to a system that helps people see relationships between different elements in a portfolio, helps teams track progress towards goals, identifies potential problems before they become real issues and compare products that would otherwise be a huge hassle to follow.
This is a systems problem. And with any systems problem, there are many strange manifestations of this problem. Like that marketing director with her 47 tabs open. No, she wasn’t failing. She was showing us the symptom of a failure to design a system to support her.
The thing nobody says out loud
Visibility into underperforming products is wonderful but uncomfortable. Therefore, most teams try to avoid building tools that create transparency into the full product portfolio. It’s not that they don’t know that’s what they need. They just don’t want to have the uncomfortable conversations that come from seeing where a product is falling short of expectations.
But the discomfort of clarity is better than the costs of confusion. Every single time.
