Maximizing product potential: A guide to building a strong product portfolio
When you operate a single-product business, most product decisions stay relatively contained. You are focused on improving one product, allocating one team’s effort, and using that product to drive growth.
That changes quickly once you expand into multiple products. Product leaders now have to think beyond individual feature decisions and ask harder questions across the whole portfolio: Where should we invest? Which products are driving strategic value? Where are teams overcommitted? And how do we keep execution aligned as priorities evolve?
That is why a product portfolio matters. It gives leaders a way to evaluate products together rather than in isolation, so they can make better decisions about investment, resourcing, and long-term direction across the business.
What is a product portfolio?
A product portfolio is the collection of all the products and services you offer to your customers. A product portfolio becomes meaningful when your organization adds additional products to sustain and grow market share and revenue.
When you add new products, you’ll need to decide how you allocate your staff and resources to support those multiple products.
A product portfolio helps you do that by providing a view of all your products together. This view helps you analyze how all of your products fit together regarding their market position, how they serve specific target customers and how they contribute to your company goals.
How to build your product portfolio
In order to add products in a way that helps you sustain and grow market share and revenue, you need to build your product portfolio intentionally.
Here are steps you can take to build an effective product portfolio, whether you’re looking to add your second product or if you’re trying to put some intention to your approach to adding products.
Define, or confirm, your target market
For starters, you need to make sure you’re clear on who you want to help solve problems. If you developed your first product with specific customers in mind, this is more an exercise in validating your choice of market.
If you didn’t have a clear idea of who you were targeting when you built your first product, there’s no time like the present to zoom in on who you intend to help with your product(s).
Conduct market research
To avoid building a solution looking for a problem, your best first step is to conduct some research to understand the market you currently operate in and markets that you’d like to enter. You should already have a lot of information about your current customers, so this is an opportunity to build on that.
Talk to your customers to find out what problems they still have even after using your product. Finding these additional jobs to be done can help you identify opportunities in your existing market or a new market you can move into.
You can also get some signals from observing what others in your market are up to. The products they introduce to, or remove from, the market can provide some insight into opportunities.
Develop a product portfolio strategy
A product portfolio strategy is your organization’s theory on how to leverage your products to achieve your business goals. You can think of it as a product strategy that governs how you align your people and resources to build and maintain those products.
Get clarity on your organization’s business goals and the metrics you use to know you’re meeting them. Then, think about how your collection of products will help you meet those goals.
To do that, figure out where each product is in the product life cycle, its market share and growth prospects. That tells you how each product currently contributes to your business goals and can help you form some decision filters for the mix of investment in your products, which forms the basis of your strategy.
As priorities shift, effective product portfolio management also helps leaders keep execution aligned with strategy across multiple teams, rather than letting each product roadmap drift in isolation.
Managing the product portfolio
Once you have defined your portfolio strategy, the next challenge is managing it in practice.
That means more than deciding which products to keep, expand, phase out, or add. Product leaders also need to understand whether those decisions are actually playing out across teams: whether investment is translating into progress, whether dependencies are slowing delivery, and whether execution still reflects the priorities set at portfolio level.
You can still use frameworks such as the Growth Share Matrix to guide investment choices. Looking at market share and growth potential is a useful way to compare products and decide where to place bets, where to protect revenue, and where to reduce further investment.
But in larger product organizations, portfolio management is not a one-time prioritization exercise. It is an ongoing leadership discipline. Teams move at different speeds, initiatives compete for attention, and new information can quickly change the right sequencing of work. That is why leaders need both a clear portfolio strategy and a reliable way to monitor how that strategy is unfolding over time.
The most effective approach is to combine portfolio analysis with portfolio visibility: making decisions across the mix of products, then regularly reviewing progress, blockers, dependencies, and alignment to business goals so the portfolio can adapt as conditions change.
There are a variety of other frameworks that help you do similar product portfolio analysis with slightly different factors. The key to all these analysis frameworks is that you make investment decisions across all of your products based on how the mix of products help you reach your business goals.
Example: Atlassian - intentional product portfolio management
Atlassian, maker of software products such as Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket is an example of a company that has taken an intentional approach to building and managing their product portfolio.
Less than two years after they released their first product, Jira, they released their second product Confluence, which was fairly quick since they were still trying to fully establish their place in the market with Jira. Their introduction of Confluence was successful because they realized it could help their current customers solve additional problems that Jira did not.
It’s easy to consider Jira and Confluence are successful products. Atlassian noted in their 2021 annual report they derive a majority of their revenue from those two products. Those two “cash cows” no doubt help fund the development of new products such as those coming out of Point A, their “innovation hub”.
The revenue produced by Jira and Confluence also made the decision to divest HipChat to Slack easier. HipChat was losing the market share battle with Slack and had few prospects for growth, so Atlassian divested it to avoid any further investment.
The lesson for product leaders is not just that portfolio decisions matter, but that they need a clear view across the whole product mix to make those decisions with confidence as markets shift.
How airfocus helps you manage your product portfolio
Once you decide which products in your portfolio to invest in, expand, pause, or phase out, the next challenge is making sure execution stays aligned with those decisions.
For many teams, a template is the right place to start. airfocus’ Product Portfolio Roadmap Template helps you visualize your products and initiatives in one place, giving you a useful high-level view of how your portfolio is taking shape.
But as your organization grows, static portfolio views often stop being enough. Leaders need to see how priorities are shifting, where progress is stalling, and whether execution across teams still reflects the strategy they agreed on.
For larger organizations, airfocus Portfolio management adds that scalable layer. It introduces Portfolios, which connect data from multiple teams into one live, editable view with real-time updates, and Dashboard views, which turn that data into charts, summary metrics, and tables for faster portfolio-level monitoring.
That makes it easier to understand how strategic initiatives are breaking down into real work, spot blockers earlier, monitor dependencies, and make better sequencing and investment decisions as conditions change.
If you are looking for a starting point, try the Product Portfolio Roadmap Template. If you need a more scalable way to monitor and manage a growing portfolio, explore airfocus Portfolio management for Enterprise teams.
Kent McDonald
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