What Is a Product Portfolio Manager?
A product portfolio manager is a role introduced to strategically oversee all the company’s products and product lines and ensure their alignment with the overall business strategy. Analyzing the company’s offerings at a high level, a product portfolio manager explains and balances the combined value proposition of all products rather than focusing on a single one. Depending on the organization, a product portfolio manager can be also responsible for allocating resources to improve the ROI or define areas of improvement.
Product Portfolio Manager’s Skills
Since product portfolio management is a strategic activity, a successful portfolio manager needs to have the following skills:
- Market knowledge: a product portfolio manager needs to understand the market for every product in the portfolio, including its current share in an existing market and opportunities to expand to new markets.
- Business acumen: a crucial part of the portfolio management is to understand how it impacts the entire business health and see the portfolio as a whole rather than focusing on individual features and assets.
- Analytical skills: a product portfolio manager uses metrics, such as business-level KPIs to identify the best and worst performing products and make changes to resource allocation to keep the portfolio balanced.
- Prioritization skills: like in product management, portfolio management is about setting priorities and making choices, but the prioritization is higher-level, and its focus is shifted from product outcomes to the strategic business goals.
- Strategic planning skills: closely linked to the skills above, strategic planning skills are required to manage the portfolio roadmap and define an umbrella set of goals that would apply to all products and product lines.
- Communication skills: all findings related to the product portfolio need to be communicated to different groups of stakeholders and the company’s leadership.
- Listening skills: apart from being a good communicator, a product portfolio manager needs to carefully listen to and process all incoming feedback and make timely adjustments to the portfolio.
Product Portfolio Manager vs. Product Manager
Both roles have much in common and require similar skills, though a product manager is responsible for the outcome of a single product, while a product portfolio manager works with multiple projects and manages shared resources, such as budgets or teams.
A product manager:
- is responsible for a specific product, its features, and product roadmap;
- defines the product strategy and vision;
- works with the product’s end users in mind;
- works on identifying features that address particular users’ needs and pains.
A product portfolio manager:
- is responsible for the entire portfolio, including interconnections between products and product lines;
- aligns the product portfolio with the overall business goals;
- works to identify additional products that can be built to address users’ needs;
- oversees product managers.
As a rule, the product portfolio manager role exists in large organizations having dozens of products. As a company grows, it needs someone to evaluate all products and monitor the broader market to strategically prioritize product development and fill in gaps in the portfolio related to opportunities for new products and new markets.
