There’s never been anything easy about bringing a product to market. From the initial inception and brainstorming session to the day products arrive on store shelves, there are countless iterative steps for manufacturers to complete and potential obstacles to address.
An effective product launch requires the complete alignment of goals between engineering teams, but also marketers, advertisers, sales representatives, customer experience officers, and more.
These challenges haven’t lessened as technology has advanced. If anything, product development is tougher today than ever before, as consumer demands are more sophisticated and more volatile. To help weather these challenges, product managers depend on software solutions, including product roadmap management (PRM) technology.
Enter Gocious, an Irvine, CA-based tech startup that has disrupted the manufacturing space in a significant way. The company’s flagship software has effectively redefined what product road mapping tools can do, providing product managers with a unique way to align not just a single-project development journey but entire product families and portfolios.
Simply put, Gocious has made it possible for product manufacturers to remain adaptive and responsive to an ever-changing consumer landscape, enabling new levels of efficiency, quality control, and competitive advantage.
A Challenging Environment for Product Manufacturers
There are a number of unique challenges that today’s product manufacturers face. The pioneering Gocious software was designed specifically to address these challenges, which include:
- Fluid customer expectations. In previous generations, product managers effectively took their finished products directly to consumers, trying to sell them on specific tools, features, or benefits. Today, consumers expect products that are made with their specific needs and pain points in mind, meaning product managers must have measures in place to gather real-time customer feedback and to incorporate it into product designs.
- Rapid changes in tech. The tech ecosystem is constantly changing and evolving, and the best product managers find ways to stay one step ahead. To ensure a product meets the tech standards of today and tomorrow, product managers must be ready to pivot, adapting their designs in response to market trends.
- Dispersed teams. It’s also worth noting that the product development process doesn’t unfold in a single room. More and more, product development teams are distributed across different locations, making it increasingly difficult for product managers to ensure clear, consistent communication, united around a single source of truth.
These are just a few of the most significant roadblocks that product managers now face. The solution, according to Gocious, is cloud-based product roadmap management software.
Read also: Top 5 Software Solutions that Help Manufacturers the Most
Gocious at a Glance
In fact, Gocious is the first cloud-based product roadmap management software designed specifically with manufacturers in mind. In short, it’s an enterprise-level software solution that makes it possible to monitor and manage an entire product portfolio, all from a single, easy-to-use dashboard.
Gocious functions as a centralized platform for product managers to plan and strategize. It also serves as a hub where every team (including not just development, engineering, and UX folks, but also the sales, marketing, and finance teams) can unite around a shared set of goals, a common timeline, and an always-up-to-date list of product features and specifications.
The Benefits of Gocious
There are a number of specific ways in which Gocious benefits product managers. The advantages of this standard-setting software include:
A Single Source of Truth
Often, the product development process is made inefficient due to having “too many cooks in the kitchen.” Certainly, trying to bring harmony and alignment to several different teams, each involved with a specific aspect of the product life cycle, requires careful coordination. And, if even one team is working with out-of-date information, it can compromise the efficiency of the whole project.
The Gocious software suite solves this problem by collecting real-time data and insights from every team, ensuring that everyone who logs into the dashboard is looking at the exact same set of current, up-to-the-moment information.
Visualization Strategies
Mapping out a product strategy may require managers to bring multiple timelines into alignment; for example, there may be an engineering and iteration timeline but then a separate one for the marketing team.
Gocious’ software makes it easy to visualize a number of different timelines at once, ensuring full strategic alignment for the entire product development process.
Company-Wide Sharing
Collaboration is central to effective product development, and it’s something that Gocious makes easy. The software provides a range of options for sharing product roadmaps and strategies across the entire organization.
The importance of this can’t be overstated, as the seamless sharing enabled by Gocious makes it possible for everyone to have a clear sense of where the product development timeline is headed, and what part they have to play in it.
Customer-Centric Capabilities
Gocious also makes it easier for product managers to hear the voice of the customer and to incorporate real-time product feedback into their designs.
This includes not just feedback provided in surveys and polls but also feedback based on actual user experience; for example, product development teams can monitor which features or interfaces seem like bottlenecks in the customer experience, streamlining those areas as needed.
Solutions
A final Gocious benefit worth mentioning is the ease of solution.
Simply put, the Gocious software makes it easy for teams to maintain up-to-date details of the features and benefits they’re prioritizing, ensuring that the final product addresses real needs and pain points. This feature is a boon to marketers, in particular, who can easily find the language they need to convey the bottom-line benefits of the product in question.
Gocious Brings a New Approach to Product Development
Product managers have their work cut out for them, with countless variables to consider as they try to bring the best possible product from the brainstorming session to store shelves.
Gocious makes that labor considerably easier to manage, providing seamless sharing, a single source of truth, visualization tools, and more. It’s the kind of disruptive software solution that the manufacturing world has been waiting for, and it’s immediately the gold standard for cloud-based product management solutions everywhere.
