UNICOM® Focal Point™ enables product managers to make decisions on what features to put into a product, what new products to build, and to develop product roadmaps based on customer priorities, competitor functionality, and market conditions.
Focal Point's pure web-based capability and underlying database repository allow you to engage directly with customers. It allows them to vote on product enhancements using pairwise comparisons - from which they emerge as part of the process and they understand how difficult the "trade-off" analysis of new features is and how easily Focal Point manages it.
Prioritize enhancements
UNICOM® Focal Point™ enables you to:
- Get up and running quickly using Focal Point's out-of-box product management template based on industry best practices
- Prioritize and visualize customer needs to make better decisions about which requirements to implement
- Build and manage a vision for your product
- Prioritize enhancements using "trade-off" analysis with best-in-industry approaches such as pair-wise comparison and stacked bar charts with ranking schemes
- Allow your customers to be part of the enhancement prioritization process, providing them web access to pairwise comparison of your enhancement list
- Manage priorities and schedule enhancements with the Development team using product roadmaps
- Manage the cycle of continuous feedback, iteration, re-prioritization, and new releases
Pairwise-comparison sessions are a great way to get your customer base involved in the product enhancement trade-off decisions that need to be made
Develop new products
Use UNICOM® Focal Point™ to:
- Collaborate with customers and subject matter experts (SMEs) in the field to rapidly develop a product concept
- Develop a business case
- Define features for the new product
- Pick the right feature combination for the new product
- Set pricing and project roadmap for design, testing, and delivery
- Reduce risks using cost estimation models
- Plan the right product with the right features to be developed at the right time and the right cost
Develop roadmaps
Use UNICOM® Focal Point™ to:
- Work with Development, Documentation, Testing, Marketing, Sales, and Operations to establish milestones and delivery dates of each release
- Plan releases over time to improve the speed and quality of delivery
- Visualize product roadmaps for enhanced communication amongst team members in your organization as well as customers
Use the product management template to quickly get up and running building roadmaps for your product
Perform product portfolio analysis
You can analyze the value of all the products in your portfolio, to make decisions on which products to increase investment in, which products to maintain, and which products to divest or sunset.
- Align products with the strategic direction of organization
- Make investment decisions with a transparent view of costs and market opportunity
- Make kill/sunset decisions
- Understand non-cost 'fuzzy' factors that make a product strategic
- Make trade-offs, based on the changing priorities of the marketplace and your organization
- Deliver investment visibility by monitoring market needs vs your total portfolio
- Implement a decision-making process that is visible and transparent
- Use objective information to support quick and accurate decision making
- Use intelligent dashboards such as stacked bar charts and bubble charts to aid the decision-making process based on strategic objectives and KPI criteria measurements
- Pick the right products to invest in and divest/sunset
- Continuously monitor the portfolio
- Optimize the overall product revenue, value to the customer, and cost of development
