This post was originally published on On Product Management.

Everywhere you turn these days, someone is talking about running experiments and tests to understand your customers or target market.

They say things like:

• use experiments to validate your ideas
• A/B test responses to interface designs
• build minimal solutions that can be built and released quickly to get ongoing feedback.

This post was originally published on Tyner Blain.

Why do products fail? Trying to organize all of the reasons that your product might fail is a Herculean effort. Understanding how your product did, will, or might fail will help you focus on what you need to do next.

Product Portfolio management is one of those important but not urgent activities that we never seem to have time to do. It is often thought of as an academic exercise; however, good product managers and product team leaders know it should be done, but struggle to organize the effort. If they take the initiative, the activity can unravel very quickly into an over heated debate about which products should be in what quadrant and why.