And we’ve probably overloaded this term, which isn’t helpful. The premise we’re making is that under Lean Portfolio Management, you’re not managing a single portfolio, but a set of portfolios - a portfolio of change (Epics), a portfolio of innovation (some of which will become Epics), a portfolio of Products (physical things which need support and maintenance - see below), a portfolio of teams (some of which may own one or more products, and which are collectively delivering your innovation and change portfolios), and potentially even a portfolio of sub-portfolios.
Sounds like we need a glossary!
I believe we’ve consistently used the term Product here for a physical thing - a computer system, or a physical widget. The equivalent of a System in your excellent example. Which is obviously different from your definition, and I think probably different from a lot of material on “Product” thinking.
I think our feeling is that this definition better aligns with the English definitions of the words, which makes it easier for people to understand. It also happens to align with the terminology used by a majority of our recent clients! But up for a debate on this, and whatever the answer is, we should be absolutely clear here on the definition we’re using.
What this means is that when we say under LPM you need to manage a portfolio of Products, what we’re saying is that you need to think about whether the physical things through which you currently deliver value to your customers are still the right things, whether some need to be decommissioned or rationalised, whether you’re driving innovation to work out what their replacements might be, where each product is in it’s lifecycle, and what that means for what you invest in.
For reference, we then tend to use the term Service for the delivery of value that’s independent of how it’s delivered (the electronic document management in your example), with one of the primary uses of LPM being to manage the Service (whether this is done at a team level or at a team of teams level).