Product Management vs. Portfolio Management: Main Differences
As a business, you need to allocate resources effectively to make the most out of your products, services, and projects. To do this, you need to know the difference between product management and portfolio management so you can assign different groups the resources they need to achieve company goals. But can product and portfolio management be the same for your business?
The Main Difference Between a Product and a Portfolio
Both product and project portfolio management are strategic tools to help you maximize, allocate, and guide resources for your business to achieve its company-wide goals. However, the difference between product management and portfolio management is where to target your focus.
Product Management
Product management focuses on allocating resources to a specific product or group of products. Product management maximizes the development, enhancement, and creation of products throughout the company while including market awareness, analytical data about similar product performances, and strategic planning of product execution and delivery.
Teams controlled by product management usually devote their time to furthering a company’s product or service. You can expand product management to encompass all a company’s products, including future products and services under development.
Portfolio Management
Portfolio management is much broader in scope than product management. A portfolio in this regard encompasses all facets of the company, including human resources, project allocation and development, and execution of company goals. This is the most significant difference between product management and portfolio management.
Portfolio management devotes time to managing a company’s “business” side. It can include product development and overlap with product management, but its primary focus is allocating resources and ensuring company goals reach their intended success markers.
When utilizing portfolio management, it is best on a company-wide level. With certain PPM providers, portfolio managers can be used virtually and from anywhere, ensuring managers and owners have access to necessary resource information regarding several aspects of the company.
Option That Most Benefits Your Business
Deciding on the difference between product management and portfolio management ultimately comes down to what your business needs most to achieve its goals and objectives. In a perfect world, you would operate your business with access to both product and portfolio management systems.
Suppose you had to pick one or the other. In that case, you should use product management to further product development and market analytics and portfolio management to allocate the resources necessary to operate your business successfully.
How You Can Utilize Both
Work Otter allows you to utilize product and portfolio management and further your business goals with cutting-edge software and technology. As the #1 ranked SaaS project, resource, and portfolio management solution, we take the confusion and division between product and portfolio management and compress it into an easy-to-use dashboard that can further your company objectives and maximize company productivity and market advantage. For more information, please take a quick tour and learn how our software can increase your business’s competitive presence and health.
