Bringing any product to market can be complicated, fraught with complex considerations about design features, messaging, market positioning, price point, and beyond. To help navigate some of these concerns, more and more product manufacturers are turning to sophisticated software solutions, including product roadmap management (PRM) tools.
This is true across virtually every manufacturing sector. It may surprise you that this is acutely the case in agriculture, where more and more agribusiness professionals are turning to technology to ensure market-ready products.
Make no mistake: Product managers working in the agricultural space have no interest in generic or legacy systems, like email chains or bare-bones spreadsheets. To ensure their teams are aligned to a standard set of data and shared objectives, these product managers are increasingly choosing cutting-edge PRM from premium vendors like Gocious.
PRM in Action: A Case Study
To get a better sense of how Gocious' software can transform the daily operations of an agricultural company, consider a case study involving AGCO.
Based in Duluth, Georgia, AGCO is a global leader in the design and manufacture of heavy equipment, specifically for farms and ranches. The company has been around since 1990 and generates billions of annual profits. Even so, AGCO knew they would improve their product offerings by using best-in-class technology. Enter Gocious.
Essentially, AGCO brought in Gocious to help them rethink their entire philosophy of product development and to enact systems to ensure efficiency and consistency throughout their product portfolio.
Gocious provided AGCO with a customized product roadmap management (PRM) dashboard, allowing all AGCO teams to access a single source of truth and easily visualize the interrelated products making up their portfolios. In essence, Gocious was brought in to help AGCO's teams collaborate better, allowing them to spend more time on product development and less time on project management.
Gocious' work was met with rave reviews by the AGCO team. "Gocious has transcended the role of a mere product management tool for AGCO," says executive Rodrigo Soeiro de Souza. "They are a critical partner in our journey to success."
Challenges & Solutions
To better understand the team-up between Gocious and AGCO, it may be helpful to think in terms of problems and solutions. First, consider some of the obstacles that AGCO's teams faced:
- They were developing complex, multi-year, multi-volume products for a huge marketplace, and yet still relied on static systems like email and spreadsheets.
- Their products continued to grow more complicated and more interconnected all the time, making it difficult for individual teams to remain on the same page about specs and features.
- Product teams were also scrambling to keep up with farmers from across the world who needed robust equipment to meet their dynamic, evolving needs.
Gocious rose to the occasion, helping AGCO to create a custom, flexible, comprehensive platform founded in cloud-based solutions, achieving the ultimate product roadmap management solution.
Instead of falling back on multiple documents and spreadsheets, product management teams at AGCO now look to a single source of truth for real time updates around multi-year product plans.
"We were invested in AGCO's mission and wanted to provide a unique solution that equipped product teams with all the capabilities needed to make a difference," comments Maziar Adl, the CTO and co-founder of Gocious. "By understanding their challenges and relaying feedback in real-time, we pledged to help problem-solve solutions for AGCO's portfolio management needs throughout the entire onboarding process. By taking the time to study AGCO's goals, we aimed to ensure our solutions brought value to all product teams and decision-makers. We truly believe in AGCO's core mission. When AGCO succeeds, their customers succeed."
Looking Past Legacy Systems
In short, Product roadmap management technologies have allowed today's farmers and agricultural vendors to collaborate more effectively than ever before. And they far exceed what's possible with legacy systems, be it Excel or an unwieldy group email thread.
"Our teams communicate more effectively, report to management more clearly, and engage ideas more thoughtfully," summarizes de Souza. "Gocious has helped modernize our approach and is infinitely better than PowerPoint and other legacy systems we've relied on in the past."
The bottom line: Product roadmap management tools provide an essential edge for today's product managers, including those in agriculture.
Gocious is a leading creator of product roadmap management platform, providing innovative solutions for manufacturing companies across the world. The tech disruptor is based in California.
