Why Use Accept Software

When Product Planning Gets Complex

Well-executed product planning is fundamental to the success of any new product. But today's reality is that complications, disconnected tools, and fragmented processes too often get in the way. Poor product planning has an adverse effect on product success in the market. Incomplete or missing features can translate into lost revenue, shrinking market share, and unhappy customers. What's needed is a new approach that enables product organizations to overcome the barriers that inevitably arise when planning products becomes complex.

Product planning in an ideal world

Product planning encompasses the diverse activities associated with shepherding a product from initial concept through execution. Its main goal is to ensure that all product lines fully deliver in terms of business objectives, such as revenues, profits, and customer satisfaction.

Product planning enables product executives and their teams to:

• Drive overall product vision, direction, strategy, and features
• Collect and prioritize ideas, requirements, and customer and market input
• Reconcile changes due to shifting priorities and resource fluctuations
• Monitor and report on development progress in context with priorities
• Share information with stakeholders via roadmaps, product backlogs communities, social media, PRDs, MRDs, and other artifacts

Benefits of product planning.

The benefits of effective product planning are far reaching. It gives everyone involved a more accurate picture of who is doing what, why, and by when. It allows product development to focus solely on development. It helps ensure that the most important ideas are captured and incorporated. The end result is that products get delivered with far more of what customers want and sales teams expect.

Complications that introduce risk.

In theory, product planning is a holistic endeavor. But in practice, it's often a haphazard affair. It becomes even more so as things grow more and more complicated. That may be just fine for smaller organizations with relatively few products and long release cycles. But it's unsustainable for large enterprises that are on the hook for delivering scores of products to increasingly demanding and impatient worldwide customers on aggressive timelines.

Learn more about common challenges.The primary obstacles to product planning are scope complexities, relationships between people, and fluid change. They present a multitude of challenges that can seriously upend your planning efforts and put your top objectives at risk.

Process silos and flying blind.

Most enterprises rely on a vast array of spreadsheets, documents, slide decks, off-the-shelf point tools, and in-house solutions to get products out the door. For instance, product management requires very different productivity tools and data management systems than marketing, sales and product development.

Problem is, these disjointed tools and information islands create process silos, leaving organizations with:

• No clear way of synchronizing efforts across teams
• No way to keep sight of the most important things as products move from concept to completion
• "Information friction" from the constant back and forth of converting data from different systems and silos
• Requirements chaos, spreadsheet hell, miscommunication, lost productivity, delays, and rework

A new approach for trying times.

In order to bring consistently great products to market, enterprises need to eliminate the work silos that keep teams in the dark and that lead to products that ultimately disappoint and even fail completely.

That's precisely what our software is designed to do.

Accept Software provides the only solutions that enable you to simplify, manage, and automate product planning in collaborative, commonsense ways. Explore the Accept Software Advantage.