Product portfolio excellence: Templates and best practices from Petra Wille
In product management, balancing incremental improvements with bold, innovative initiatives is something like an art. It’s a challenge that requires both strategic foresight and tactical agility. At airfocus’s Top PM Voices webinar, Petra Wille, renowned product leadership coach and author of Strong Product People, shared her proven methodologies for achieving product portfolio excellence. Here are the key insights from her talk, along with actionable advice and a closer look at how airfocus’s tools can help.
P.S. You can catch the full replay of the webinar here.
TL;DR: Key takeaways
Adopt a layered framework: Use delivery, discovery, portfolio, and idea-to-opportunity task boards to align team activities with strategic goals.
Prioritize transparency: Clear communication and visibility across teams and leadership build trust and alignment.
Balance comfort vs. bold projects: Allocate resources strategically between maintaining existing products (comfort zone) and exploring new opportunities (bold bets).
Use trash cans wisely: Regularly discard ideas that don’t align with strategy—but avoid the costly "golden trash can" of building and then killing projects.
Collaborate cross-functionally: Involve sales, marketing, and other teams in opportunity assessments for better alignment and prioritization.
Leverage tools for portfolio excellence: Templates can help teams get started, while portfolio management software gives leaders the live visibility needed to scale the framework across the organization.
Why product portfolio management matters
A well-managed product portfolio ensures that your team isn’t just focused on keeping the lights on but is also driving the organization toward future growth. As Petra explained:
We don’t want to have a situation where we only fell in love with ideas that contribute to comfort zone projects. It’s crucial to dedicate some capacity to bold bets.
Without a structured approach, it’s easy for teams to lose sight of strategic goals, misallocate resources, or neglect long-term innovation.
Petra’s framework for product portfolio excellence
Petra shared a layered approach to product portfolio management that she originally sketched on a napkin during a conversation with our CEO Malte Scholz. Here’s a breakdown of her methodology:
Delivery task boards
Most teams have mastered managing delivery work through agile practices like Scrum or Kanban. These boards track ongoing tasks and ensure smooth workflows within teams.
Discovery task boards
Fewer organizations have dedicated boards for discovery, where they validate ideas and opportunities. Petra emphasized:
Discovery boards help teams stay transparent about where they are in exploring new opportunities.
Portfolio task boards
This high-level view offers transparency into opportunities in discovery, delivery, validation, or sunsetting stages. It ensures alignment across teams and facilitates strategic decision-making.
Idea-to-opportunity boards
This board helps filter incoming ideas through the lens of product strategy and goals. Ideas not aligned with strategic objectives are discarded early, saving time and resources.
Not every idea should be built. Use trash cans liberally, but avoid the golden trash can at all costs!
The golden trash can refers to delivering something only to discover later it has no impact.
Key challenges in product portfolio management
Despite the elegance of Petra’s framework, implementing it may come with hurdles:
Leadership buy-in
Gaining leadership support for either comfort zone projects or bold bets is often a struggle.
Leadership buy-in can go both ways ... for some, it’s hard to secure buy-in for comfort projects; for others, it’s the bold bets that face resistance.
Collaboration with sales and marketing
Sales and marketing teams often have different priorities, which can create friction. Bringing them into the planning process and fostering transparency can alleviate this.
Balancing rocks, pebbles, and sand
Petra used the metaphor of rocks (large initiatives), pebbles (medium-sized projects), and sand (small tasks) to illustrate resource allocation.
If everything becomes sand, you’re not moving the needle on strategic goals. Conversely, too many rocks and your team burns out.
The role of tools in driving portfolio excellence
Frameworks create clarity. But for product leaders overseeing multiple teams, product lines, or business units, clarity also depends on having the right level of visibility.
That is where portfolio management tools make a real difference. It is one thing to define how delivery, discovery, portfolio planning, and idea assessment should connect. It is another to make those connections visible in day-to-day practice, without relying on static slides, spreadsheets, or manual status reporting.
airfocus collaborated with Petra to develop a Product Portfolio Template that simplifies implementing her framework and helps teams apply this kind of structured portfolio thinking. The template connects delivery teams’ task boards to a high-level portfolio view, enabling real-time alignment and transparency across the organization.
But today, that goes beyond templates alone. With airfocus Portfolio management, leaders can use Portfolios to bring data from multiple teams into one live, editable view, then use Dashboard views to turn that data into charts, summary metrics, and tables for faster portfolio-level assessment.
This makes Petra’s framework easier to operationalize at scale. Instead of treating portfolio oversight as a periodic reporting exercise, leaders can monitor the portfolio continuously, using real-time dashboards and flexible portfolio views to track progress, priorities, risks, and alignment across the organization.
For product leaders, that means:
a unified view across teams and initiatives
clearer visibility into progress and blockers
better alignment between strategy and execution
less time spent consolidating updates manually
more confidence in prioritization and investment decisions
Templates are still a valuable starting point. But as portfolio complexity grows, leaders need more than a model to follow. They need a live system for monitoring and steering the portfolio over time.
“We continue to support complex, large product organizations,” says Malte Scholz, Head of Product and co-founder of airfocus. “We built this because we know that, as product organisations scale, work can become distributed across teams, product lines and business units. While this supports execution, it can also create a visibility gap for leaders.
“Getting a clear picture of priorities, progress, and risks across the portfolio typically means switching between tools, chasing status updates, and assembling reports that are out of date before they're shared. Portfolio management in airfocus is designed to close that gap.”
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Conclusion
Balancing comfort zone projects with bold new initiatives isn’t easy, but Petra Wille’s insights show it’s absolutely possible. With a clear focus on transparency, alignment with your goals, and the right tools like airfocus, you can set your team up for success. It’s all about finding that sweet spot between maintaining what works and taking calculated risks to drive innovation. You’ve got this 🙌.
Watch Petra's full webinar replay here.
Additional resources
What is a Product Portfolio Strategy and How to Develop It? - Andrea Saez
Maximizing Product Potential: A Guide To Building a Strong Product Portfolio - Kent McDonald
Portfolio vs Product Roadmaps: When and How To Use Them - Andrea Saez
Nouran El-Behairy
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