Balancing Existing Product Maintenance and New Product Development

In today’s increasingly competitive market, businesses constantly face a critical choice: should they rely on stable revenue from existing products or fully pursue growth opportunities through new product development? The answer is almost unanimous—most teams opt for a parallel approach. However, a key challenge emerges: how can they succeed on both fronts without failing at either? Many companies encounter issues when implementing a multiproduct strategy: they either overinvest resources in maintaining existing products, causing new product development to stall due to insufficient funding and manpower—and ultimately miss critical market opportunities—or they blindly bet on new products, neglecting the daily maintenance and optimization of existing ones, which leads to the loss of core users, cashflow disruptions, and undermines the foundation needed to support new initiatives. In reality, the key to keeping existing operations healthy and profitable while systematically exploring new opportunities lies in holistic planning and dynamic management of all products, ensuring that existing and new developments complement rather than compete with each other.

1. Unified Vision: Achieving Strategic Consensus with Stakeholders

Whether maintaining existing products or developing new ones, a lack of unified strategic direction often results in internal resource conflicts and implementation obstacles. Stakeholders include internal parties such as management, product teams, technical teams, and sales teams, as well as external ones like key customers and investors. Different stakeholders have varying priorities: management may focus on overall profitability and strategic execution; sales teams tend to prioritize stable performance of existing products; technical teams may be more interested in exploring new technologies; while investors often emphasize long-term growth potential. Therefore, the first step must be to align all stakeholders under a shared strategic vision. For example, through strategy workshops or communication meetings, teams can be guided by core principles such as “ensuring over 80% core user satisfaction for existing products while reserving 20% of resources for new product R&D.” Investors should be informed of phased plans and expected returns for new product development to secure long-term funding. Core customers should be engaged to clarify urgent optimization needs for existing products and align on the pacing of nonurgent requirements. Only when all stakeholders understand and agree on this strategy can efforts be coordinated and goals aligned, laying a solid foundation for subsequent work. Additionally, it is essential to rationally acknowledge the inherent risks and potential failures—not every major project will succeed.

2. Clear Guidance: Establishing Well-defined Product Requirements

Requirements are the starting point of product work; vague or unclear requirements inevitably lead to chaos in later stages. If a team fails to understand the pain points and optimization directions for existing products or to identify the target market and unmet needs for new products, launching initiatives blindly often results in wasted maintenance efforts and misguided development for new products, consuming resources without meaningful progress. Thus, it is crucial to establish clear product requirements. For existing products, the focus should be on optimizing user experience, addressing issues, and ensuring stable revenue—such as improving the bug submission process or enhancing data loading speeds. For new products, requirements should center on uncovering potential pain points, defining core functionalities, and attracting new user segments, validated through market research and small-scale testing to avoid impractical assumptions. Additionally, all requirements must be prioritized to clarify which are urgent and which can be deferred, providing clear guidance for resource allocation and task execution.

3. Closed Loop Management: Ensuring Orderly Requirement Flow

With clear requirements in place, a closed loop management mechanism is essential to ensure that requirements progress orderly from proposal, evaluation, and implementation to review, avoiding issues such as oversight or loss of control in multiline operations where maintenance and development needs intersect. The core of closed loop management lies in establishing standardized processes and clear responsibilities. A unified channel for collecting and submitting requirements—whether from internal teams or external users—should centralize all inputs into one platform to prevent fragmentation. A formal evaluation mechanism should periodically assess requirements based on strategic goals, resource availability, and expected benefits to determine scheduling. Clear ownership and timelines for implementation must be assigned, distributing requirements to corresponding product groups or responsible persons, with detailed work plans and regular follow-ups to monitor progress and address obstacles. Postimplementation reviews should evaluate outcomes, such as changes in user satisfaction after optimization or market feedback from new product pilots, to gather insights and refine future requirement management. The entire process—from collection, review, and allocation to implementation—should be documented to ensure traceability, facilitating problem-solving and improving efficiency. Through such closed loop management, every requirement can be accurately tracked and effectively implemented, ensuring orderly progress in both maintenance and development.

4. Flexible Allocation: Implementing a Dynamic Resource Distribution Mechanism

With limited resources, how to allocate them appropriately between existing product maintenance and new product development is key to balancing both. A fixed resourceallocation model often proves inflexible amid market changes—for instance, when sudden issues in existing products require significant resources for resolution, fixed allocations may hinder timely fixes; conversely, when new product development reaches a critical breakthrough needing additional resources, constraints may cause missed opportunities. Therefore, a dynamic resourceallocation mechanism must be adopted, adjusting resource input based on market shifts, productlifecycle stages, and requirement priorities. Specifically, two approaches can be taken: categorize resources to distinguish flexible ones (e.g., general technical staff, temporary budgets) from dedicated ones (e.g., core maintenance personnel for existing products, specialized equipment for new products); and establish a dynamic evaluation and adjustment system to regularly assess the operational status of existing products and the progress of new developments, then reallocate resources accordingly. For example, when existing products enter a stable phase with fewer issues, maintenance resources can be reduced to redirect personnel and funds to new product development. Conversely, if existing products face a crisis—such as widespread user complaints or core functionality failures—resources can be temporarily shifted from new product development to ensure stability. During critical phases of new product development, resources can be reallocated to provide necessary support. This flexible mechanism ensures both the stable operation of existing products and the advancement of new initiatives, maximizing resource efficiency.

Managing multiple product lines involves numerous projects, diverse personnel, and lengthy processes. Relying solely on manual coordination and recordkeeping often leads to oversights and disorder, rendering methodologies ineffective. Therefore, to successfully implement the above strategies, efficient collaboration tools are indispensable. Platforms such as ZenTao, an integrated projectmanagement tool, can help embed these methodologies into daily operations, enabling the goals of stable revenue from existing products and growth from new ones to take root. Separate requirement pools can be created for existing and new products to manage all internal and external requirements, preventing omissions. Requirements can be structured hierarchically (e.g., business requirements → user requirements → development requirements) or created directly as development tasks. Upon submission, requirements automatically enter an “under review” status, with customizable review rules and outcomes (e.g., approved/needs clarification/rejected, with reasons). Different reviewers can be assigned based on requirement type and importance, with critical demands undergoing multiperson reviews to mitigate risks. Macro parent requirements (e.g., optimizing system functionality) can be broken down into specific subrequirements (e.g., reducing pageload time to under two seconds, enabling realtime multiplatform data synchronization between PC and mobile), facilitating detailed task management. Comprehensive requirement descriptions, acceptance criteria, and documentation reduce communication costs and enhance efficiency. Visual requirementtask relationship diagrams clarify the corresponding relationships, aiding team understanding.

For multiproductline management, efficient requirement progression and flexible resource allocation rely on clear role permissions and crossline collaboration capabilities. ZenTao’s personnelmanagement module supports quick adjustments to permission groups, facilitating flexible resource allocation across projects. To ensure data security, general personnel working on existing products may not have access to new product resources. During resource allocation, simply modifying their permission group grants access to new product requirement files, allowing relevant personnel to independently review information without bulk file transfers, improving efficiency and preventing transmission errors. The platform also supports creating new permission groups with customizable scopes, avoiding repeated adjustments to individual permissions. When future resource reallocations are needed, modifying the group permissions suffices, significantly boosting operational efficiency. By mastering requirement closed loop processes, permission control, and resource allocation, multiproduct line management can be effectively realized.