Stop Overspending on Low-Value Product Development Ideas

One of the biggest challenges Executive Leadership faces is ensuring that business investments provide positive returns. And one of the most challenging areas of the organization to do this is in your Technology and Product Development areas.

The challenge is further exacerbated by the fact that most of our initiatives don’t have clearly defined outcomes and without those outcomes, we have nothing to track to determine if our investment in the initiative yielded anything valuable to the business and its bottom line.

To change this scenario, you need to change the approach, moving away from cost and duration being a primary input into financial decision-making and over to value outcomes that can be tracked during the development efforts.

In moving to an outcome-based planning capability you are shifting the company to an investment mindset. With an investment mindset, we begin to establish Portfolio objectives, meaning we set goals and objectives for the returns we expect to receive from our initiatives.

QValue is an investment-oriented Product Portfolio planning approach designed for managing your Technology and Product Development investments.

There are three main components of QValue:

1. Strategic Alignment — We work with you to identify your strategic objectives and align them with value factors that generate your value score.

2. Value Identification — We work with you to identify the value outcomes that will create the most value related to your strategic objectives. This creates a holistic alignment of all of your business capabilities.

3. Value Realization — And finally we work with you to understand the importance of creating a value realization dashboard that provides the quantifiable value that has been delivered by initiatives. A very important outcome of this effort is making it transparent when you reach the point of an initiative where the value received is exceeded by the cost of the investment. This provides you with a clear decision-making process so you can move on to the next valuable initiative in your Investment Portfolio.

QValue has proven to change the way leaders talk about what they should be investing in, ensuring that only the most valuable work is being moved to teams to deliver. By setting Portfolio Investment thresholds for Value Identification, we keep less valuable work from cluttering our Portfolio Backlog.

Every organization has limited capital to invest in their technology capabilities, and as a Sr. Leader, you have a fiduciary responsibility to manage that investment to ensure the highest return on individual investments.

Think of your technology portfolio as a combination of stocks (product development) and bonds (technology health and enablement) that need to have a level of diversification to maximize a return on investment. And also, be clear when to ‘sell’ an investment in favor of another one that will deliver higher value.

Let me help you develop a strong Investment Portfolio for your organization and provide you transparency on your ROI. To set up a time to talk, you can either send me an email at michael@soundagile.com or go to www.soundagile.com to schedule an appointment.