Overview of the Latest Product Portfolio Management Tools

Successful product portfolio management process requires more advanced tools than simple spreadsheets. Companies need solutions that provide them with real-time data, comprehensive visibility into their product portfolio, resource optimization capabilities, and decision-making tools. This is where product portfolio management (PPM) software comes into play.

This article lists the trending product portfolio management tools with unique functionalities necessary for boosting overall productivity and ensuring successful product delivery. With this product portfolio management software comparison, it will be simpler for you to choose the right vendor and get the desired business outcomes.

What Is Product Portfolio Management Software?

Before we dive into the product listing itself, we’d like to figure out why we actually need product portfolio management tools. To provide you with a better understanding of the goal of adopting new software, we’ll cite Jan Willem Tromp, a multi-project resource management expert, consultant, and co-founder of Epicflow:

“The primary goal of good project portfolio management is preventing resource overload and protecting the entire project portfolio from increased waiting times and low productivity”.

Though it’s about project portfolio management, the goal of effective product portfolio management doesn’t differ dramatically. And this is where you’ll hardly do without a smart software solution.

Now, let’s take a closer look at this kind of software and its capabilities.

Product portfolio management software is a tool that helps companies optimize the management of their product and project portfolios. What is the main purpose of this software? With its help, it becomes easier to achieve strategic alignment, maximize ROI, and achieve competitiveness. Product portfolio management tools make it possible to track performance and programs, allocate resources, prioritize, and align products with business goals.

What are the key capabilities of product portfolio management tools? Here’s their quick overview.

Portfolio visibility: Provide a centralized view of all projects and products.
Resource management: Wise resource allocation and resource capacity planning help ensure optimum resource utilization.

“Projects are typically part of one or more portfolios, and effective portfolio management is essentially effective resource management.”

Jan Willem Tromp, a multi-project resource management expert, consultant, and co-founder of Epicflow.

Roadmapping: Helps manage a product’s lifecycle with all its milestones, timelines, and dependencies.
Risk management: Helps mitigate negative risks and take advantage of opportunities.
Robust reporting: Facilitates effective monitoring and control by providing KPIs, dashboards, and other performance analysis opportunities.
Scenario planning: Allows project managers to assess different scenarios before starting work on products.

As we’ve considered the essence and functions of product portfolio management tools, it’s time to review their importance for business organizations.

What Are the Benefits of Effective Product Portfolio Management Tools?

In simple terms, smart product portfolio management software helps organizations achieve their goals, implement their business strategies, and contribute to increasing ROI. But you might want to know the full list of benefits provided by PPM software. So, let’s get started.

Strategic alignment: PPM software helps you align product portfolios with a company’s business strategy, which contributes to achieving business goals faster.

More effective resource utilization: Resource management capabilities, including capacity planning tools and workload management, help you utilize available resources most efficiently across the entire product portfolio. Why is it important? This helps optimize costs and streamline product development processes.

Better decision-making: Scenario planning capabilities help you run different scenarios. In this way, you can see the consequences of strategic decisions before making them. So, it helps you make data-driven decisions, reduce potential risks, and contributes to a more effective product development process.

Comprehensive control of the whole portfolio: PPM software features like dashboards, reports, and other overviews help project managers analyze progress and perfromance.They can also get insight into entire portfolio’s state, asses if it requires corrective action and take action if necessary.

Faster time-to-market: How is it achieved? Streamlined work on product development, timely responses to risks, comprehensive portfolio control, and absence of resource bottlenecks accelerate a product’s time-to-market.

Increasing customer satisfaction: All the above-mentioned factors help companies deliver their products on time, in line with customers’ expectations, which in turn contributes to their satisfaction.

Top 8 Product Portfolio Management Solutions

Epicflow

Epicflow is AI-powered portfolio management software designed to simplify complex multi-project and resource management. It’s based on the unique approach that derives successful project delivery thanks to the wise utilization of available resources, reducing bottlenecks, and optimizing decision-making. Its AI-driven features help forecast bottlenecks and find the best possible ways to eliminate them. What is more, Epicflow has a virtual assistant, Epica, that simplifies work with the tool and significantly increases its effectiveness. Finally, Epicflow follows the highest data-security standards: it’s JOSCAR-registered and pen-tested by the British Ministry of Defense, which makes it suitable for industries and organizations that prioritize data security.

Epicflow supports product portfolio management with the following capabilities.

Key features

Resource-centric planning

Epicflow’s powerful resource management capabilities enable organizations to visualize real-time resource availability across the entire portfolio, prevent employees from overload, and resolve resource conflicts as well as ensure optimal resource utilization.

Multi-project and portfolio visibility

Epicflow provides users with a comprehensive overview of all active and inactive product development projects. You can track the progress of complex projects and analyze resource performance. Also, it helps prioritize critical projects and reschedule the ones with lower priority for later. Finally, Epicflow lets managers perform risk assessment based on capacity data and delivery timelines.

Intelligent prioritization

Epicflow analyzes project constraints (remaining buffer, resource availability), supports objective decision-making, and encourages value-based delivery instead of reactive management. Its task prioritization capabilities help team members work more efficiently and keep focus on the most critical project tasks. The opportunity to assign business values to product development projects in the portfolio helps distribute resources effectively so that none of the highest-priority projects are delayed.

Scenario simulation

Epicflow allows product portfolio managers to simulate a wide range of planning scenarios. This helps them understand the impact of adding a new project to the pipeline, forecast delivery times with current capacity of resources, and optimize project portfolio based on resource availability.

Real-time performance insights

Epicflow offers dynamic dashboards and project tracking, resource performance assessment as well as due date performance analysis. These historical and real-time insights help detect bottlenecks and inefficiencies early on and take necessary corrective action before it’s too late.

Epicflow is a scalable solution that is suitable for growing businesses and large enterprises. It integrates with popular project management tools like Jira, MS Project, Oracle Primavera, and others. This offers an opportunity for teams to work in their familiar environment, while management can get actionable insights provided by Epicflow.

Epicflow supports product portfolio management in various industries: aerospace and defense, automotive, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, software development, and others.

Planview

With data-driven approach and an emphasis on collaboration, Planview platform is an optimal solution for businesses among the popular product portfolio management tools. This solution provides critical data on every stage of product development, allowing the team to embed new ideas and improvements. In turn, the customizable dashboards with other advanced features provide support for cross-functional teams, and these benefits make Planview an excellent portfolio management product life cycle software. With the availability of free trial and demo, managers should consider this alternative to deliver the best products without compromising operational efficiency during the deployment phase. Planview will be suitable for businesses that aim at rapid scaling and developing complex product portfolios.

Key features

Strategic alignment
Prioritization
Resource and capacity management
Product roadmapping
Lifecycle performance management
Risk and dependency analysis

Planisware

Planisware complements the list of product portfolio management software by featuring its convenient scaling tools for small and large enterprises. This tool offers comprehensive solutions to industries ranging from high tech to aerospace. The cons of choosing this service provider are the costs of providing all essential product portfolio management tools and techniques. Thus, choosing Planisware may require prior experience in using familiar software, making this option less suitable for new enterprises with straightforward projects.

Key features

Strategic alignment
Roadmapping
Investment planning
Scenario analysis
OKR tracking
Product-level management
Resource and capacity management

Craft.io

The next platform embraces innovative and comprehensive features for effective product portfolio management. This end-to-end solution for managing product portfolios allows managers to get the full picture of all products’ performance and business objectives through macro and micro views functions. Also, the executives can significantly boost team productivity by leveraging this product portfolio management software. The two-week trial version is also available.

Key features

Strategic alignment
Roadmapping
Prioritization frameworks
Capacity planning

Triskell Software

This vendor offers a comprehensive bundle of tools designed to streamline product portfolio planning, monitoring, and execution. It aims to help organizations align product initiatives with strategic objectives, optimize resource utilization, and drive innovation across the product lifecycle. However, this product portfolio management software requires advanced technical skills to use the centralized platform effectively.

Key features

Strategic alignment
Multi-portfolio management
What-if analysis
Resource and capacity planning
Financial management
Lifecycle management

Quickbase

Quickbase is an original software that supports product portfolio management. It’s designed for dynamic working environments, where agility is a critical component of a team’s success. Considering the cost-performance ratio, this choice may be well-suited for a wide variety of companies, regardless of industry type or size. While Quickbase provides a flexible environment for managing product portfolios, it lacks specific product portfolio management capabilities like strategic alignment or scenario planning.

Key features

Customizable dashboards
Workflow automation
Resource and capacity planning

Asana

The flexibility and simplicity of product portfolio management tools and techniques make Asana a popular choice for different companies. User-friendly design in addition to the availability of all basic instruments comprise additional factors in choosing this platform for meeting the essential requirements of product portfolio management. However, companies that aim at scaling and utilizing financial tracking or strategic alignment functions should not consider Asana as a plausible choice. This platform delivers solid results for small firms and mid-sized teams but will underperform in environments that require advanced portfolio management product life cycle software.

Key features

Reporting dashboards
Portfolios and nested portfolios
Workload management
Timeline and dependency tracking
Status updates

Airfocus

The distinguishing feature of Airfocus is its unique built-in scoring system necessary for the effective prioritization of tasks and processes. In addition to this original solution, team leaders can effectively gather customer feedback to optimize the product strategy. Thus, Airfocus can become an indispensable portfolio management product lifecycle software. With solid pricing and free trial, users should try this platform to experience its possibilities for enhancing productivity and quality. Moreover, a public-facing portal provides an opportunity to make important announcements to customers.

Key features

Portfolio roadmaps
Multi-workspace management
Strategic alignment with OKRs
Customizable prioritization frameworks
Feedback and insights management

Recommendations for Choosing a Suitable Product Portfolio Management Tool

It’s crucial to select the product portfolio management tool that will help you align product portfolio with the business strategy, optimize resource utilization, and maximize ROI. You should consider the following factors.

Strategic alignment capabilities: The PPM tool should facilitate the alignment of the developed products with a company’s goals and market opportunities. This is where roadmapping, prioritization, and scenario planning can assist.
Real-time visibility and advanced analytics: Consider a solution that offers real-time portfolio analytics, dashboards, reports, and other critical features that help monitor performance and make informed decisions.
Resource management: The tool should have resource management features like capacity and workload management, availability tracking, resource planning, resource allocation, resource performance tracking, and others.
Integrations: Integration capabilities with other tools are critical. They can be project management platforms, ERP, HRM, CRM, or other tools used by the organization.
Scalability and flexibility: The PPM solution should be adaptable to the changing needs of your organization.
User friendliness: It’s advisable to select the PPM solution with an intuitive interface to reduce the learning curve and accelerate its adoption by the team.

By focusing on these areas, you can select a PPM tool that drives innovation, enhances collaboration, and improves decision-making on the portfolio level.

Conclusions

Here’s the summary of the most important points of the article.

Product portfolio management tools are solutions that help optimize the management of products and project portfolios. It contributes to achieving strategic goals, ROI maximization, and competitive advantage.
Key capabilities of PPM software include: portfolio visibility, resource management, roadmapping, risk management, real-time reporting, portfolio dashboards, and scenario planning.
PPM software provides organizations with the following benefits: ensuring strategic alignment, optimization of available resources, improving decision-making, faster time-to-market, and increased customer satisfaction.
When selecting a product portfolio management tool, you should pay attention to the following criteria: strategic alignment and resource management capabilities, visibility and advanced analytics, integration, flexibility and scalability, and user friendliness.
Epicflow is an example of a solution that supports effective product portfolio management. Its powerful portfolio and resource management capabilities ensure smooth workflows, high resource efficiency, and timely project and product delivery.

Contact us to learn more about Epicflow’s functionality for seamless and effective orchestration of your product portfolios.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is portfolio product management?

Product portfolio management is the process of managing a collection of products developed by a company. This embraces the entire product lifecycle, from product development and launch to its retirement. PPM involves analyzing market demands, strategic alignment, resource availability, and portfolio’s profitability.

What are the benefits of product portfolio management?

Effective product portfolio management contributes to strategic alignment, optimum resource utilization, reduced risks, improved decision-making, and improved portfolio performance.

What is product portfolio management software?

Product portfolio management software is a tool that facilitates effective PPM by providing specific functionality: portfolio visibility, strategic alignment, resource management, scenario planning, dashboards and reports, etc.