When a product portfolio grows rapidly, it’s essential to stay focused on strategies and customer needs. For me, the key factors in managing a successful portfolio are: • Strategic Goals: Aligning with both short-term and long-term strategies for brand, business, and category growth. • Customer Needs: Understanding the most important product attributes that define the ideal product for consumers. • Market Data: Keeping track of category trends, competitor actions, and identifying gaps that can generate business opportunities. • Operational Efficiency: Ensuring the portfolio is efficient to create, produce, and maintain. • Performance Evaluation: Regularly assessing how each product contributes to the business and revenue.

If your product portfolio is growing quickly, it's important to step back and strategize. Understand how the new additions add value to the overall organization and targeted users. In any growth surge, the priority for me is working with engineering to ensure that infrastructure is able to handle any product extensions and increased load from users. Assess and evaluate customer feedback. Prioritize new or existing features that delight customers and continuously add value. When your portfolio is growing, it's critical to make sure that any new products that you add to the portfolio have significant impact to existing users. Also, keep in mind that the impact you are seeking is strong enough to attract new ones too.

In my experience, customer feedback is like a compass—it helps steer you in the right direction. While working on a fintech product, we received numerous feature requests from users. We segmented the feedback into must-haves, nice-to-haves, and irrelevant suggestions. I strongly feel that prioritizing what users genuinely need (and will use) ensures you’re solving the right problems. We also validated feedback through surveys and usability tests, which revealed gaps we hadn't considered. By aligning features with real customer pain points, we increased adoption and satisfaction post-launch.

To effectively prioritize features, consider: 1. Strategic Alignment: Ensure features align with business objectives. 2. Customer-Centric: Prioritize based on customer needs and feedback. 3. Prioritization Frameworks: Use RICE scoring, MoSCoW method, or value vs. effort matrix. 4. Agile Methodology: Break down features into smaller tasks and prioritize within sprints. 5. Continuous Evaluation: Regularly assess feature performance and adjust priorities.

When your portfolio expands quickly, feature prioritization is critical to maintaining focus and delivering value. Here’s how I stay on track: - Anchor Decisions in Strategic Goals: Align features with your product vision and company objectives. Prioritize initiatives that drive measurable business impact and support long-term growth OVER short-term wins. - Leverage Data-Driven Insights: Use customer feedback, usage, and market trends to evaluate feature value. Quantifying impact helps eliminate bias and ensures resources are allocated effectively. - Balance: Consider dependencies, "lights-on" commitments, and customer satisfaction. Avoid over-investing in one area while neglecting others, ensuring the portfolio thrives holistically.