Great question! Let’s start with the obvious – congratulations! Anytime you are asked to take over a product line or a portfolio it means you have proven your abilities managing a single product.

On the surface, the simple answer to your question is “there is no difference”. Nearly all of the same tools that made you successful with an individual product will help you succeed managing a portfolio. Visiting buyers and potential buyers to learn their unsolved problems; surveying market segments to determine pervasiveness and urgency; promoting company investments to solve those problems…all are useful tools when managing a portfolio.

The real difference will come when you can clearly articulate the strategy for the portfolio, because that will impact the priorities of the underlying products. So, as a portfolio manager, you’ll prioritize based on the needs of the entire portfolio, and at times sacrifice the needs of individual products within that portfolio.

Let me illustrate…

Years ago I worked in a shop that had multiple individual software products. Each was designed to improve the overall speed and efficiency of some other piece of software. Products like the ones I had then are called “performance monitors”. We had performance monitors for the operating system, the database, the network – I am sure you get the idea.

Now, each product had its own list of priorities to make it better. But the feedback from our target market was that our buyer wanted these products to work better together.  Our customers loved how we fine tuned the operating system, the database and the network. But what they wanted was for us to improve the performance of the application itself! And that meant our products needed to ‘share’ information.

With this market research in mind, we invested first to enhance cross-product integration, and second to improve individual products. Thus, the portfolio strategy, once crafted by listening to the market, dominated the individual product strategy.

Make sense?

It will be up to you in your new role to listen to your market with a broader orientation, with an ear towards things you could do that will solve their problems with the complete portfolio. Do this well and overall sales transaction sizes should go up. And that is a very good thing!

Best of luck to you in your new role.

Answered by Jim Foxworthy