Lean Product Portfolio Management
Offered By: University System of Maryland via edX
Course Description
Overview
Today’s organizations find themselves in an increasingly competitive marketplace. As competitors move fast and consumer demands evolve faster than ever before, the ability and willingness to be agile is critical but not sufficient.
Organizations need an enterprise capability to constantly define their purpose (the “why”) and focus (the “what”) at all levels to maximize value creation and delivery.
Product management practices build unprecedented discipline during the course of building a successful product. Teams constantly evaluate who they are building for, what they should build, and why they should build it. Developing a clear understanding of these aspects (the “who”, the “what” and the “why”) prior to undertaking the expensive build process ensures two critical outcomes - that an organization’s limited resources are constantly aligned to delivering highest value, and the output aligns with what the customers are looking for, thereby ensuring product success.
We start with building a deep understanding of the customer focusing on a single product throughout its product life cycle in the first course. We build up on this approach by introducing related product offerings. This allows for managers to envision their programs and teams working in a diverse product portfolio using Lean principles.
Building on that understanding of the product portfolio, we pursue an understanding of what a Product Enterprise is, why it makes sense to build one and how to get there. This second course lays the conceptual groundwork that enables achieving the vision of a customer-centric value creation business model centered around lean principles.
Finally, the capstone course lays out the details of building out a scaled product enterprise that’s customer-centric, and explores alignment of organizational support functions with a scaled product framework that lays the pathway for a sustainable value maximizing enterprise at scale.
In summary, this certificate will help you build a product enterprise through lean product portfolio management. It will build up on core lean principles to help create scalable internal alignment to uncover and deliver highest value opportunities on a continuous basis.
Syllabus
Course 1: Lean Product Portfolios: Beyond Value Stream Mapping
The approach to creating a product portfolio delivering exponential value must transcend the obvious by incorporating a deep understanding of customer behavior, shaping the trajectory of the business and understanding emerging trends in technology, marketplace and the competitive landscape in local and global context.
Course 2: Lean Enterprise Framework: Transform the Business Model
Learn how to lead and transform businesses into Product Enterprises through values, processes, organizations, strategy, and cultural shifts to long-term, customer centric business models creating exceptional value on a sustainable basis.
Course 3: Customer-Centric Enterprise: Scale Product Lifecycle Management
Learn to drive the performance of Product Enterprises with Product-first frameworks that enable value with mature governance, risk, marketing, sales, finance, and HR functions.
Courses
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This course provides a flexible and customizable playbook to build out a Product Enterprise and evolve an organization’s Business Model. It explores the build out of a robust thought framework, creation and alignment of multiple building blocks to evolve a fully operational model of a scaled product enterprise. Specifically, it explores the following key concepts:
● Understanding a Product Enterprise and how it works
● Achieving strategic and operational enterprise alignment using the OKR framework across the product portfolio
● Building & implementing a product platform strategy
● Organizational Governance and Risk framework in a Product Enterprise
● Aligning organizational functions (like Marketing, Sales, Finance, HR) transform to a product-first approach
● Maximizing organizational value creation through a scaled product framework
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Lean Product Portfolios: Beyond Value Stream Mapping is about building and managing products collectively as a portfolio to maximize value creation. It explores these key concepts:
● Customer centricity and Value Stream Mapping across related products
● Product Design using Lean Principles for Product Lines and Product Suites
● Building Scalable Enterprise Architecture
● The use of User Research & Human-Centered Design
● Day-to-day Product Management: Individual Product Plans & Integrated Portfolio Roadmap
● Actionable strategies for Product Lifecycle Management, including -
o New Product Strategy
o Market Acquisition, Expansion, Realignment
o Product-Market Fit, Go-to-market, & post-launch expansion
o Product and feature retirement (overlaps, non-opportunities, lifecycle decision)
● Creating and managing a complex Product Portfolio using Lean principles
Potential case studies for this course could include the challenges of evolving legacy product lines, such as Modernization Acceleration in Insurance and Banking industry, SSN management at Social Security Administration, health records at CMS; as well as new scaled product offerings at major tech companies like PayPal.
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This course provides foundational understanding of what a Product Enterprise can be, why it makes sense to build one, identifies key roles and provides an approach to shape the transformation journey. It builds critical expertise around:
● Product driven business capabilities that power multiple value streams
● Creation of a Portfolio strategy that enables creation & use of scalable, reusable technical capabilities
● A framework for prioritization that maximizes long-term business value alongside customer centricity
● Business Model design that aligns product value streams to business capabilities to technical platforms and solutions
● An operational model to accelerate modernization of complex outdated systems into state of the art cloud-based apps
Taught by
Tushar Rathod
Tags
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