Large product families have many products and features that require product management attention, particularly in identifying the links and cross-product opportunities. To manage a large product line, product managers are assigned to each major product in the family with an additional product manager ensuring consistency between the various products.

Imagine an enterprise implementation with a server-based architecture, various client components, and implementation services. Coordinating these components into a coherent release plan is incredibly challenging. For example, an enterprise network fault management system has server-side monitoring and response mechanism running on a third-party database.