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Developing products well-fit for now and tomorrow requires smart, future-focused planning. Multi-Generation Product Planning (MGPP) is a comprehensive method allowing organizations to properly manage and improve their goods lineups over the years.

It sees the full product lifespan, from concept to retirement. It accounts for generations after while coordinating portfolio roadmaps with company targets, tech trends, and demands.

It also involves soundly directing assets, abilities, and potential risks. Through MGPP, companies can make savvy calls, fine-tune their goods selection, and stay ahead in their fields.

By overseeing the present and anticipating ahead, MGPP empowers continuous relevancy, freshness, and growth fit for tomorrow’s inevitable shifts and chances. It champions constant evolution in how needs get met.

Key Highlights

• Multi-Generation Product Planning (MGPP) takes a broad view of product growth spanning entire lifecycles and versions ahead.
• It syncs goods roadmaps with long-view company aims, emerging techs, and shifting wants.
• MGPP brings together cross-team effort, portfolio management, and ability planning. It helps organizations think ahead of rivals by expecting tomorrow’s needs and crafting novel offerings.
• Utilizing it demands an organized process, clear communication, and constant upgrades. Its widespread view considers today with an eye toward future goods and their support of the overarching strategy.
• By weaving together current and coming capabilities and markets, MGPP champions relevance, freshness, and success enduring beyond today.
• MGPP primes continued advancement and impact through coordinated efforts aligned with where direction must head.

What is Multi-Generation Product Planning (MGPP)?

MGPP takes a broad view of continually upgrading an organization’s product selection together.

It links upcoming editions and required tech timelines throughout the present and coming versions.

Core to MGPP – envision offerings not just as individuals, but with a strategic vision extending through future releases. This empowers smarter funding choices, wiser asset management, and outpacing competition.

Very relevant for timely-changing tech fields where lifespan grows shorter.

Forecasting tech disruptions, evolving demands and industry changes well ahead keeps options ready to best serve tomorrow. Proactively forging advantages maintains relevance through change.

Key MGPP perks:

• Optimized portfolio guiding and resource allotment
• Quicker new release debuts
• Smoother product transitions and retirements
• Repeatable tech, parts, and learnings across goods
• Enhanced ability spotting and seizing arising chances

While upfront MGPP work proves significant, its long haul savings, lowered risks and edge makes adopting an embedded strategy vital for frontline innovators progress-focused on meeting arising needs.

Key Components of MGPP

Multi-Generation Product Planning encompasses several key components that work together to enable long-term strategic product planning and management. The core elements of MGPP include:

Product Roadmaps and Technology Roadmaps

A critical part of MGPP is creating detailed product roadmaps that outline the vision, direction, and planned evolution for products over multiple generations or lifecycles.

Complementing this are technology roadmaps that map out the capabilities and innovations required to enable future product plans.

Product Portfolio Planning with MGPP

MGPP takes a holistic portfolio view, aligning product plans across different product families, platforms, and lines.

It synchronizes new product development with managing existing products through their lifecycle. Effective product portfolio planning is vital for resource allocation and investment prioritization.

Product Platform and Architecture Planning

To maximize reuse and leverage economies of scale, MGPP emphasizes planning for common product platforms and modular architectures that can underpin multiple product variants.

This allows for efficient capability reuse and derivatives across a product portfolio.

Capability Roadmapping and Development with MGPP

MGPP incorporates roadmaps for building the critical capabilities required for future products, whether core technologies, features, intellectual property, or specialized skills.

It aligns capability investments with product plans.

Innovation Management

As part of the long-range view, MGPP factors in strategies for driving product innovation through methods like technology scouting, voice-of-customer inputs, R&D initiatives, and partnerships.

Effective innovation management fuels the pipeline of advances for future products.

MGPP Process and Framework

The MGPP process provides a structured approach for organizations to plan and manage their product portfolios over multiple generations or lifecycles. The core framework typically consists of several key stages:

Product Portfolio Review

This initial stage involves a comprehensive review of the organization’s existing product portfolio. This includes analyzing the performance, market position, revenue streams, and lifecycle stages of current products.

It helps identify opportunities for product improvements, discontinuations, or new product development.

Technology Roadmapping with MGPP 

Organizations conduct in-depth technology forecasting to identify emerging technologies, trends, and capabilities that could drive future product innovations.

This road mapping exercise aligns R&D efforts with long-term product strategy.

Strategic Product Planning

Based on the portfolio review and technology roadmap, organizations formulate a multi-generational product plan.

This strategic plan outlines the vision for future product platforms, product lines, and individual products over a specified time horizon (e.g. 5-10 years).

Capability Development Planning

To execute the multi-generation product plan, organizations map out the capabilities (technological, process, skills, etc.) required to develop and commercialize the envisioned products successfully.

Capability gaps are identified and addressed through targeted investments and skill development initiatives.

Resource Allocation and Prioritization with MGPP

Given the strategic product roadmap and capability requirements, organizations prioritize and allocate resources (financial, human, technological) across various product development initiatives in an optimized manner aligned with overall business goals.

Program/Project Execution

The defined programs and projects for new product development or product improvements are executed through standard program/project management methodologies adapted for the MGPP context.

Review and Course Correction

The MGPP plans are regularly reviewed and course-corrected based on changing market conditions, technology disruptions, or shifts in strategic priorities to maintain alignment and relevance over the multi-generation timeframe.

Aligning MGPP with Organizational Strategy

For multi-generation product planning to be truly effective, it must be closely aligned with the overall organizational strategy and vision.

MGPP is not just about managing the product pipeline and roadmaps – it needs to ladder up to higher-level strategic goals and objectives.

Linking to Corporate Strategy

The MGPP process should start by understanding the company’s overarching corporate strategy in terms of markets to pursue, competitive positioning, financial targets, and long-term vision.

The product plans and technology roadmaps developed through MGPP then become key enablers and implementation plans for achieving those broader strategic aims. There needs to be a tight linkage between MGPP deliverables like product roadmaps and the strategic plan.

Enabling Business Capabilities

Beyond just product plans, MGPP should also map out the business capabilities and resources required to execute the product strategy. This includes manufacturing capabilities, supplier relationships, marketing capabilities, sales channels, and any other enabling functions.

The capability development roadmaps ensure the organization has the right skills and competencies in place over the multi-generational timeframe.

Portfolio Prioritization 

With a finite set of resources, tough decisions must be made on where to invest and what initiatives to prioritize.

It provides a structured process and methodology for evaluating, prioritizing, and balancing the product portfolio based on strategic criteria like market attractiveness, competitive advantage, and financial returns. This product investment prioritization is a key aspect of aligning MGPP with strategy.

Organizational Engagement

Securing buy-in and adoption across the organization is critical for MGPP’s success. The MGPP process should engage cross-functional stakeholders and incorporate input from key sectors like marketing, sales, R&D, manufacturing, and finance.

This creates organizational alignment behind the product strategy and roadmaps.

Case Studies and Best Practices of MGPP

To better understand how MGPP works in practice, let’s look at some case studies and examples of companies that have successfully implemented it.

Case Study 1: Toyota’s Product Platform Strategy

Toyota is renowned for its multi-generational product planning approach, especially with its product platform strategy.

By developing flexible and modular platforms, Toyota can plan product lifecycles and derivatives years in advance.

Their platforms like TNGA allow for efficient development of multiple vehicle models and generations from a common architecture. This long-term platform thinking is a hallmark of effective MGPP.

Case Study 2: Apple’s Roadmap for iPhone

Apple has mastered the art of multi-generation roadmapping with its iPhone product line. Each new iPhone release is carefully plotted years in advance, with the company developing new hardware capabilities, software features, and semiconductor designs in anticipation of future models.

Apple’s ability to have a 3-5 year roadmap for the iPhone exemplifies best practices in MGPP for sustaining product leadership.

Best Practices

1. Align MGPP with Strategic Objectives

Effective MGPP must be directly aligned with the overarching strategic vision and objectives of the organization. Product roadmaps spanning multiple generations should link back to key goals like market share, revenue targets, or new market entry plans.

2. Leverage Advanced Portfolio Management

Companies practicing MGPP need robust portfolio management capabilities to analyze and prioritize product investments across multiple timeline horizons. Advanced portfolio management tools and methodologies enable dynamic planning and resource allocation.

3. Promote Cross-Functional Collaboration  

MGPP requires intense collaboration across functions like R&D, marketing, manufacturing, and finance. Creating a culture of cross-functional teamwork and information sharing is critical for multi-generational planning success.

4. Adopt Flexible Product Platforms

As seen in the Toyota example, implementing modular and scalable product platforms enables greater flexibility and reuse across generations of products. This platform-based approach is a best practice for MGPP.

5. Continuously Update Roadmaps

Rather than a static multi-year plan, MGPP roadmaps need to be continuously updated based on changing market conditions, new technologies, or strategic shifts. Actively managing and adapting roadmaps is vital.

Future of MGPP and Emerging Trends

The future of multi-generation product planning looks promising as organizations continue to recognize the importance of long-term strategic planning and product roadmapping. Several emerging trends are shaping the evolution of MGPP practices:

Agile MGPP: Traditional MGPP frameworks were often rigid and inflexible. The future lies in adopting agile principles that allow for more adaptive and iterative product planning processes.

This involves continuous feedback loops, frequent roadmap updates, and the ability to pivot strategies based on changing market conditions or customer needs.

Digital Transformation: The rapid pace of digital transformation is forcing companies to rethink their product strategies and technology roadmaps.

MGPP will need to account for disruptive technologies, evolving customer expectations, and the integration of digital capabilities into product offerings.

Data-Driven Decision Making: With the increasing availability of data and advanced analytics tools, MGPP will become more data-driven.

Organizations can leverage customer data, market insights, and predictive analytics to make more informed decisions about product portfolios, feature prioritization, and resource allocation.

Ecosystem Collaboration: Successful product planning often requires collaboration with partners, suppliers, and other ecosystem players.

The future of MGPP will involve closer integration and coordination across the extended enterprise to align product roadmaps and leverage complementary capabilities.

Sustainable Innovation: As sustainability becomes a strategic imperative, these frameworks will need to incorporate environmental and social considerations into product planning.

This includes designing for circularity, minimizing waste, and addressing ethical and regulatory concerns throughout the product lifecycle.

Talent and Skills Development: Effective MGPP requires a diverse set of skills, including strategic thinking, technical expertise, and cross-functional collaboration.

Organizations will need to invest in developing talent and upskilling their workforce to support advanced product planning capabilities.

Automation and AI: Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technologies are expected to play a larger role in these processes.

This could include automating certain planning tasks, using AI for predictive modeling, or leveraging machine learning to optimize product portfolios and roadmaps.

As the pace of change continues to accelerate, the ability to plan and execute multi-generation product strategies will become increasingly critical for organizations to stay competitive and meet evolving customer needs!