Overview
The Portfolios area organizes digital architecture into four root portfolios and provides the stable Goods and Services for Sale boundary for the organization’s business product hierarchy. It gives leadership visibility into product health, budget allocation, market offer, and strategic balance.
Key Concepts
- Root Portfolios — The four top-level groupings that all products belong to. Your organization defines what these represent (e.g., by business unit, delivery model, or strategic theme).
- Goods and Services for Sale — The operator label for the stable internal
products_and_services_soldportfolio. Organization-owned ProductLines and Products describe what the business sells here. The global DPPM taxonomy is reference classification, not a mutable substitute for this hierarchy. - Workforce Portfolio — The internal portfolio formerly labeled For Employees. It covers the digital products used by employees, contractors, AI coworkers, robots, non-human identities, and other accountable work actors.
- DPPM Taxonomy — A 481-node product classification tree used to categorize products by type, capability, and market segment. Products are tagged with taxonomy nodes to enable filtering and benchmarking.
- Backlog Archetype Scope — Epics and backlog items can indicate whether work is platform-wide, common across archetypes, or specific to an archetype category or leaf archetype. This gives portfolio reviews a cleaner split between shared substrate investment and market-specific coverage gaps.
- Health Metrics — Calculated scores for each portfolio based on product lifecycle distribution, investment balance, active issues, and operational performance.
- Inventory Counts — Product profiles and inventory tabs count canonical discovered entities only. Retained superseded records preserve repair provenance without appearing as additional live estate.
- Risk Concentration — A measure of how unevenly investment or strategic risk is distributed across a portfolio. Useful for identifying over-dependence on a single product or technology.
What You Can Do
- View the four root portfolios and drill down into their product groupings
- Review the organization-owned product-line rollup for Goods and Services for Sale
- Open a product line’s Direction workspace to compare its real products, recorded sales, evidence gaps, and pending decisions. Product detail remains separate from the enabling digital-product architecture views.
- Check portfolio health scores and understand which products are contributing to issues
- Review a product’s current discovered estate without duplicate repair tombstones inflating its inventory count
- Review budget allocations and compare planned vs. actual investment
- Separate platform, common, and archetype-specific backlog demand before making roadmap or budget tradeoffs
- Identify risk concentration and rebalance product groupings
- Use the AI coworker to request a health summary or register a new product
The Products home adapts its default detail to the selected navigation mode. Guided mode keeps child lines and evidence sources collapsed; professional mode opens denser comparisons. Both views use the same product-line hierarchy and commercial evidence, so changing disclosure does not change the underlying reporting boundary.
Product direction and review
A product line’s Direction workspace compares its Products using the evidence the organization actually has: sales, demand, objectives, outcome observations, and linked delivery work. It highlights missing evidence as unavailable rather than turning it into a zero, and prepares a reviewable next decision without changing pricing, funding, capacity, or the catalog.
Open an individual Product from that comparison to review its current objectives, learned outcomes, derived Now/Next/Later roadmap, and recurring product-management playbooks. Roadmap lanes are projections over the canonical backlog and objective links; they do not create a second roadmap authority or invent dates, dependencies, product teams, or consumers.
For a simple business, the first view stays focused on the owner-operator’s next useful action. Denser evidence provenance, comparison detail, and coworker scheduling controls appear only when the operator asks for them or switches to professional disclosure.