When I began my career in product development, I didn’t understand how easy it is to screw up a product line. I had the opposite view. I thought managers of established product lines had an easy job. They didn’t have to worry about developing and launching new stuff. They needed only to manage pricing, promotion, and […]

There’s a major difference between product and product line thinking. And not knowing how to manage each differently is costing companies a lot of money. Do you know the difference between a product and a product line? I’m sure you do, but do you recognize that how you address the difference can make or break […]

Jobs-to-be-Done Pioneers

“Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything.” — Wyatt Earp The market for getting the JTBD job done is like the Wild West. There are gunslingers and sheriffs, pioneers and hustlers. This isn’t about good guys and bad guys. Everyone want’s what’s best for JTBD and for themselves. But I use the Wild West metaphor […]

Fast Product Development

Winning the Red Queen’s Race in New Product Development “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” – Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass Does product development seem […]

Agile-Responsive-Roadmap

The Need for Responsive Roadmapping Agile implementations have a big problem. When they bump up against an organization’s culture, progress can stop. It turns out, behaviors and practices can be a brick wall. To me, it’s humorous to hear experts say Agile’s full benefits accrue only from “transformative implementations.” They declare an organization, from top […]

Where is Roadmapping Taking Us? Roadmapping has been on quite a journey. Many managers use the term to describe planning and tracking projects. But they use different schemes to create roadmaps. And the results vary widely. There’s much to learn from roadmapping’s evolution. This is especially true for innovation management and product development in big […]

Product Line Facts

Interested in Product Line Strategy and Roadmaps? Can you name a successful company without a powerful product line? What about a company that failed because a product line died? It’s easy to see the impact product lines have on business health. The problem is that good product line strategy gets lost in the culture of […]

Go Beyond Single Product Innovation Look over a few articles on innovation. Are they about innovating one product at a time or whole product lines? This is important because a product line has far more impact in business than does a single product. It’s time to think much bigger. It’s time to push full product […]

The Profound Impact of Product Line Strategy In my book and Masterclasses, I lay out a strong framework for product line strategies.  I complement this with an easily understood lexicon. Together, the framework and lexicon are important to gaining greater impact from product lines. And they’re not just for product line teams. Let me explain […]

product line roadmap

How Product Line Roadmaps Differ From Product Roadmaps And Why You Need Both A product line roadmap is a timeline graphic that communicates how a team intends to carry out a product line strategy. It shows milestones and key relationships between strategy parts. At least one platform-lever[1] is central to most product line strategies. Teams […]