What is product portfolio management? The complete guide

Great products don’t just support the business—they drive it. Our 2025 Predictions for Product Teams Report found that 92% of product leaders now own revenue outcomes, more than double compared to just a few years ago.

That shift makes effective product portfolio management more critical than ever. It’s how companies maximize revenue by making the right strategic bets, accelerate planning cycles for faster innovation, and align resources to strategic priorities. Today, AI is taking this even further, reshaping how product leaders innovate and scale.

In this article, you’ll get a complete guide to portfolio management: what it is, why it matters, and the strategies we’ve seen leading product teams use to optimize their product portfolios.

What is product portfolio management?

Product portfolio management is how companies strategically balance their entire product lineup to drive growth and long-term success. It’s about making deliberate choices—what to invest in, what to sustain, and what to retire—based on how each product aligns with broader business objectives and market opportunities.

At its core, portfolio management is about tough trade-offs. Success isn’t just defined by what you build, but also by what you choose not to build. The strongest portfolios concentrate resources on the products that create the greatest long-term value, keeping teams focused and strategy-driven.

How does product portfolio management differ from product management?

Product management focuses on building and growing a single product, shaping its roadmap, features, and customer experience.

Product portfolio management takes a step back, looking across all products to decide which to invest in, scale, or retire.

Both roles are essential. Where product managers drive success at the product level, portfolio managers optimize the mix to align with company strategy and maximize overall ROI.

Key aspects of product portfolio management 

Product portfolio managers play a variety of roles, from tracking performance to allocating teams and budgets. Here are some of their most critical responsibilities. 

Proposal intake

Portfolio managers collect, score, and prioritize business proposals by defining the needs, goals, and constraints each product must meet. With a standardized business requirements document (BRD) intake process, they apply consistent evaluation criteria to streamline investment decisions and ensure every initiative advances the company’s strategic objectives.

Allocating resources

Resource allocation is about making smart tradeoffs to align people, time, and money with strategic priorities. Portfolio teams track capacity, allocate talent across initiatives, and rebalance resources as priorities shift. Using data-driven frameworks, they evaluate market potential, technical feasibility, and outcomes to decide where to invest for maximum impact.

Tracking OKRs

Product portfolio managers help write company objectives and key results, cascade them to product teams, and link every initiative to measurable outcomes. And with the right OKR tools, they can even track progress through automated updates, making it easy to show in real time how product investments drive business results and ensure strategic alignment at scale.

Monitoring product performance

Product leaders track KPIs and product performance metrics to identify new opportunities to improve the user experience and boost revenue. Some common performance indicators include churn rate, feature adoption rate, usage rate, engagement metrics, and net promoter score (NPS).

Coordinating cross-functional teams

Leadership and project management are at the core of product portfolio management. Portfolio managers coordinate cross-functional teams, manage dependencies, and align collaboration across product lines. They unite departments like marketing, sales, DevOps, and customer success to drive execution and spark innovation.

Why is a product portfolio strategy important?

According to McKinsey, the average S&P 500 company lasted 61 years in 1958. Today, it’s less than 18. Disruption is accelerating across every industry, while customers and executives alike demand faster, more personalized, and more seamless experiences.  This puts product teams under mounting pressure to lead innovation and deliver measurable business results. The companies that keep pace are those with a strong product portfolio strategy—one that ensures they focus on the right products and deliver them at the right speed.

Yet many teams still struggle. Airtable research revealed that only 31% of product leaders feel confident they’re building the right product for their market, and one in five say their product roadmaps are often derailed by reactive decisions. Strategic portfolio management changes that—aligning product choices with business strategy while balancing incremental improvements against breakthrough innovations.

What are the objectives of product portfolio management?

Chief product officers, head of product operations, and other product leaders use portfolio management to achieve these key objectives:

Strategies for effective product portfolio management

Great portfolios aren’t built on guesswork. From standardized BRD intake to smarter resource allocation, here are the strategies top product leaders use to maximize impact—and how AI-powered tools like Airtable’s ProductCentral help them get there.

1. Standardize intake for smarter ideas with less friction

When proposals lack a consistent evaluation process, the loudest voices often overshadow the most strategic ideas. Clear, standardized criteria coupled with AI to enhance and improve proposals will ensure you’re gathering higher quality ideas, aligned tightly to potential impact and strategic focus. Opt for a product management tool that provides the investment rationale and portfolio prioritization needed to stay aligned with business strategy. With ProductCentral, for example, you can automate scoring and connection to strategic priorities to surface the initiatives most likely to drive meaningful outcomes.

2. Align resources with strategic priorities

Great portfolios don’t spread resources thin—they concentrate them where they’ll have the greatest impact. That means continuously making tradeoffs about budget, headcount, and skills across initiatives. AI is already reshaping this process: 33% of product leaders say it improves resource allocation by revealing team capacity and modeling potential outcomes. For instance, AI in ProductCentral delivers real-time visibility into allocation data and forecasts how shifting resources will affect timelines, risk, and overall portfolio performance.

3. Cascade objectives and track progress in real time

Strategies fail when company goals don’t translate into clear team-level objectives. Cascading OKRs throughout the organization creates alignment, while real-time tracking keeps teams accountable to outcomes. The right tools make this possible: platforms like ProductCentral automate updates and use AI to flag misalignment or delays early, so leaders can course-correct before small issues become major roadblocks.

4. Use data-driven insights to guide portfolio decisions

Data is essential when deciding whether to scale, pivot, or sunset a product, but fragmented systems and silos make it nearly impossible to see the full picture. By consolidating performance, adoption, and customer insights into a single view, leaders can clearly identify which products to double down on and which to retire. Tools like ProductCentral create that single source of truth, eliminating version control issues and surfacing trends automatically so portfolio decisions are grounded in real evidence.

5. Streamline cross-team collaboration and dependency management

Large portfolios often get bogged down in cross-team coordination, where dependencies create bottlenecks and duplication. Systematically mapping and managing those dependencies accelerates delivery and reduces risk. For example, teams using ProductCentral can automatically surface critical dependencies, see the impact of different allocation scenarios, and keep collaboration flowing without the overhead of manual reporting.

6. Ground portfolio decisions in the voice of the customer

A portfolio is only as strong as its connection to real customer needs. Collecting feedback from tickets, surveys, sales calls, and social channels ensures products solve real problems and deliver meaningful experiences. Yet 40% of product leaders still rely on manual analysis to make sense of ever-growing volumes of feedback. AI-powered tools like ProductCentral change that by turning thousands of data points into clear themes, sentiment analysis, and actionable insights—so portfolio strategy is anchored in the voice of the customer, not assumptions.

Product portfolio management example: Cisco

Cisco manages one of the world’s most complex product portfolios, with offerings spread across multiple lines and life cycle stages.

In a recent conversation, Jeetu Patel, EVP & Chief Product Officer at Cisco, explained how effective portfolio management has been central to driving growth. For him, the skill lies in balancing the mix of products:

But managing a portfolio at that scale isn’t just about avoiding decline or chasing growth. It’s about creating synergy—making sure individual products aren’t built in silos but instead fit together into a cohesive whole. As Jeetu put it:

In other words, effective portfolio management isn’t micromanaging every product or passively overseeing a collection of business units. It’s acting as an architect of integration, ensuring that from the start, products are designed to connect, reinforce one another, and advance a unified company vision.

What are the challenges of product portfolio management?

Managing a large, complex product portfolio is no small feat. Product leaders face a unique set of challenges that can derail strategy, slow down innovation, and limit growth. Here are some of the most common roadblocks—and how to get past them.

1. Portfolio visibility gaps

When data is siloed across tools, outdated, or incomplete, leaders can’t see the full picture. This leads to misaligned investments, redundant projects, and missed opportunities. The fix: consolidate performance, adoption, and financial data into a single source of truth so decisions are grounded in real-time insights rather than stale reports.

2. Manual and time-consuming reporting 

Too many product teams still spend hours pulling together slides, sheets, and status emails just to keep leadership informed. In fact, our research shows product leaders spend up to 66% of their time on manual work like chasing updates and compiling insights—leaving only a third of their day for innovation, analysis, and leadership.

Automating status updates and connecting portfolio data directly to executive dashboards frees up teams to focus on strategy and execution. Modern product management platforms take it further with conversational AI integrated with your data. For example, with Omni, Airtable’s always-on AI expert, product teams can ask natural-language questions about their portfolio and instantly get accurate insights, trends, and recommendations.

3. Resource allocation chaos

Balancing people, budget, and priorities across multiple product lines is one of the hardest parts of portfolio management. Without visibility into capacity and dependencies, teams risk duplication, bottlenecks, and delayed launches. The solution is to use data-driven frameworks (and increasingly, AI) to model tradeoffs, identify resource gaps, and optimize allocation across initiatives.

4. AI integration challenges

AI promises to transform product innovation, but many organizations struggle to implement it effectively. Without the right data infrastructure and clear operational frameworks, AI investments often fail to deliver. Leaders need to pair AI adoption with strong governance, dedicated resources, and clear use cases—so AI augments decision-making rather than becoming another shiny tool that goes unused.

5. Scale bottlenecks

As portfolios expand, coordination complexity explodes. Traditional project-based approaches simply can’t keep pace with the interdependencies and shifting priorities of modern product organizations. Overcoming this requires portfolio-level systems like ProductCentral that track dependencies, streamline collaboration, and provide a unified view of progress across all teams.

6. Missed opportunities

Slow responses to market changes mean competitors seize openings first. Without real-time insight into customer needs and market signals, product organizations risk falling behind. The answer: build feedback loops that capture, analyze, and operationalize customer and market data quickly, so product leaders can pivot before opportunities slip away.

Transform scattered product teams into a coordinated portfolio machine

ProductCentral is the AI system of work for smarter, faster, more flexible portfolio management—bringing customer insights, product strategy, and team execution together in one place. With ProductCentral, product leaders can use AI to stay aligned, eliminate strategic drift, and focus teams on the highest-impact bets. The result: 50% less coordination overhead, data-driven decisions about when to scale, pivot, or sunset, and clear line-of-sight between every product initiative and the company’s strategic goals.

See how ProductCentral can take your business to new heights by booking a demo today.