Many a times, product managers work on a project, launch it and move on to the next project. Have you been in a situation where, 6 months later, there is a request from your business partner for an enhancement and you realize there is no money or a project team to implement that enhancement?

I have faced this issue with projects and many a times with vendor solutions – not the ones that come with a multi-year, multi-million dollar support contracts, but bespoke tools / calculators built by agencies or smaller firms.

I found that there are two approaches to resolving this challenge –

1. Include a small maintenance budget in the contract: A good ballpark is 5-10% of the total project cost. Create an enhancements backlog, prioritize it frequently, and manage it like you would manage a project, but with low overhead. This typically works best for vendor managed solutions.
2. Create an “enhancements project” across all your digital products:  Create one product backlog for all enhancements. You can fund this as a separate project or ask each new project to allocate a certain recurring “fees” to the enhancements project.  The enhancements project is great for ramping up new product managers in your company as they would get to work with a wide range of products and business partners.

I have used a combination of both these approaches to solve this issue. Every now and then, there will be an enhancement that would be bigger than the breadbox. These are treated as separate projects. So far, these approaches seem to be working well. If you have tried out other interesting ways to solve this problem, send me a note.