Agriculture industry members constantly seek to bring the best products to market, from farmers and ranchers to heavy machinery suppliers. To help them ensure success in the marketplace, these professionals increasingly turn to advanced technology, navigating the product development cycle with precision and efficiency.
Crucially, agriculture has shifted away from legacy and generic technologies, such as email and spreadsheets, in favor of next-gen solutions. For example, product roadmap management (PRM) software innovations have empowered product teams to collaborate more seamlessly.
What is PRM, exactly? Product roadmap management encompasses the strategic planning, prioritization, and communication of a product's development direction and critical milestones. PRM outlines the product's desired features, enhancements, and timelines, aligning with business objectives and customer needs. It also serves as a dynamic blueprint, guiding product development teams toward the completion of the product and executing a successful go-to-market strategy.
Let's consider a brief case study on the recent partnership between AGCO and Gocious to better understand how PRM has changed the agriculture vertical.
A Case Study in Brief
Since 1990, Georgia-based AGCO has been one of the world's foremost suppliers of heavy machinery, specifically for agricultural applications. Their product portfolio is extensive, and they are active in markets worldwide.
Gocious is a tech startup based in California. It is known for its disruptive work designing best-in-class product roadmap management software.
AGCO enlisted Gocious to develop a custom PRM application tailored to the company's unique needs. Let's look at some of the problems AGCO was trying to solve, Gocious' solutions, and the results.
Problems
AGCO makes some of the world's most respected agricultural machinery. Their equipment always gets better, but the constant evolution has also brought challenges. AGCO's products increasingly rely on intricate and interrelated components that require a high level of synergy and precision to function—and that's not always easy!
Moreover, the company has found success worldwide, but its diverse customer base expects advanced, next-gen products that can keep up with the dynamic needs of the agriculture sector. AGCO approached Gocious, seeking a PRM solution to help their teams keep pace with these fluid, ever-evolving customer expectations.
Solutions
Gracious rose to the challenge, developing a custom PRM application with AGCO in mind.
Where AGCO previously relied on legacy and generic technologies, such as standard-fare Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, Gocious developed a cloud-based solution that allowed all AGCO teams to access a single source of truth.
The software made it easier than ever for AGCO's employees to forecast product development iterations, to provide real-time status updates, and to remain fully aligned with big-picture business goals.
"By taking the time to study AGCO's goals, we aimed to ensure our solutions brought value to all product teams and decision-makers," comments Gocious co-founder and CTO Maziar Adl. "We truly believe in AGCO's core mission. When AGCO succeeds, their customers succeed."
End Results
Gocious' work for AGCO resulted in some considerable benefits. The final results included:
- By partnering with Gocious, AGCO gained a single source of truth for all product and development data, making sharing information across the company's global footprint easy.
- Design, engineering, and finance teams are now able to spend more time on strategic and creative work, less time on tedious administrative concerns.
- Gocious also provided AGCO with a turnkey system, ensuring real-time status updates, giving stakeholders visibility into product life cycles, and furnishing teams with actionable insights to consider new product iterations carefully.
"Our teams communicate more effectively, report to management more clearly, and engage ideas more thoughtfully," explains Rodrigo Soeiro de Souza, Director of Global Product Roadmaps Management and Product Investment Prioritization at AGCO. "Gocious has helped modernize our approach and is infinitely better than PowerPoint and other legacy systems we've relied on in the past. We no longer spend time worrying about project management tasks that would slow us down. We can now focus on doing product management, setting our vision, and strategically planning the next generation of products."
The End of Legacy and Generic Tech?
The bottom line: Today's product managers require sophisticated solutions to keep their teams aligned and their products on point. Antiquated solutions no longer work. Instead, cutting-edge PRM is increasingly necessary to maintain a competitive advantage.
Gocious is a tech startup focused on innovative PRM solutions. The business headquarters are in California; Gocious focuses on disrupting the product development field by introducing the first-of-its-kind product roadmapping software for the manufacturing industry.
