The daily business of farming has changed quite a bit in recent generations. Today’s agribusiness leaders are increasingly open to the role of technology in optimizing their processes and ensuring the best, most market-ready products.
But here’s the thing: Farmers no longer want to rely on the antiquated tools and technologies of yesteryear. Legacy and generic systems, from spreadsheets to unwieldy email chains, are out. Advanced product roadmaps are in!
More and more farms are hiring product managers, who use best-in-class software solutions to ensure their agricultural offerings remain attractive, competitive, and valuable within the marketplace.
A company called Gocious has led the way here, creating product roadmapping technology that has unique utility in agribusiness. Simply put, product roadmap management solutions, like the ones offered by Gocious, help farming product managers to stay on-target with their production schedules, marketing messaging, and more.
Case Study: How Product Roadmap Management Software Aids Agribusiness
Here’s a case in point: An agriculture business called AGCO enlisted the help of Gocious, relying on their product roadmap management tools to help streamline their operations and ensure business efficiency.
Founded in 1990, AGCO is headquartered in Duluth, Georgia. It’s a multi-billion-dollar company, providing heavy equipment and precision agricultural solutions to farmers and ranchers across the world.
Engaging Gocious
AGCO engaged Gocious to help their product management teams think more systematically, and to ensure a higher standard of efficiency with the company’s complex, multi-component products and long, multi-year processes.
The product roadmap management solutions provided by Gocious provided a single source of truth for AGCO’s personnel, meaning they were all drawing from complete, real-time information and that they were all aligned to the same deadlines and product iterations.
The Results
Simply put, Gocious’ technology enabled AGCO to manage a large product portfolio more effectively transversely many sprawling marketplaces, providing transparency and alignment across the entire company.
“Gocious has transcended the role of a mere product management tool for AGCO,” summarizes Rodrigo Soeiro de Souza, a top executive at AGCO. “They are a critical partner in our journey to success.”
The team at Gocious is similarly effusive. “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,” says CTO Maziar Adl. “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.”
The Benefits of Product Roadmap Management in Agriculture
To better understand the benefits of working with a company like Gocious, consider some of the specific results that AGCO has been able to achieve, all through the adoption of best-in-class product roadmap technology.
Single Source of Truth
Through their use of product roadmap management technology, AGCO now has a single source of truth for all product and development data, accessible throughout their global organization. This has enhanced product, engineering, finance, and other teams, allowing them to feel like they are more closely aligned with big-picture business goals.
Turnkey Systems
Product roadmapping has also provided AGCO with a turnkey system, offering them real-time status updates, providing stakeholders with insight into product life cycles, and furnishing teams with actionable insights that allow them to explore new ideas and to expand their presence in the marketplace.
Data Visualization
Another benefit of product roadmapping: AGCO now has automated visuals, including five-year and ten-year product visuals that are available with the click of a button. What this means is that AGCO teams can now show inter-dependencies on shared components, and more clearly envision their goals.
Ease of Collaboration
Finally, teams across AGCO find collaboration significantly easier. This is particularly true of those teams that are impacted by product changes, such as the sales, customer success, and engineering departments. These teams benefit greatly from Gocious’ snapshot view, abbreviating update times from weeks to mere seconds.
Beyond Legacy Systems
The bottom line: Product roadmap management tools have allowed today’s agricultural vendors to work more seamlessly and effectively than ever before. And they far exceed what’s possible with legacy systems.
“Our teams communicate more effectively, report to management more clearly, and engage ideas more thoughtfully,” comments 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.”
Simply put, for product managers in the field of agriculture, product roadmap management is the way forward, ensuring smarter teams, happier customers, and more effective products.
Gocious is a leading provider of product roadmap management software for the manufacturing industry, offering innovative technology solutions for manufacturing companies across all verticals. The company headquarters are based in California.
