Providing a digital infrastructure, platform technologies foster interfirm collaboration between loosely coupled companies, enabling the formation of ecosystems and building the organizational structure for value co-creation. Despite the known potential, the development of platform ecosystems creates new sources of complexity and uncertainty due to the involvement of various independent actors. For a platform ecosystem to succeed, it is essential that the platform ecosystem participants are aligned, coordinated, and given a common direction. Traditionally, product roadmaps have served these purposes during product development. A systematic mapping study was conducted to better understand how product roadmapping could be used in the dynamic environment of platform ecosystems. One result of the study is that there are hardly any concrete approaches for product roadmapping in platform ecosystems so far. However, many challenges on the topic are described in the literature from different perspectives. Based on the results of the systematic mapping study, a research agenda for product roadmapping in platform ecosystems is derived and presented.

Basically all companies today go beyond the development of single products and offer set(s) of similar and related products. In marketing, one such set is often called a product line. Nevertheless, still today most products are not yet engineered as product lines, i.e., they are not yet derived from a single platform. In this paper, we explore the relation of these two forms of product lines. It is shown that under certain circumstances engineered and marketed software product line subsume different products. This paper shows how these two perspectives differ and why a difference in products between these perspectives may be appropriate from a company perspective. Finally, it is argued that activities currently subsumed under product management and scoping should be closely coordinated, allowing companies to optimize their product portfolios since decision-making is facilitated

Here an overview of the state of the art of QFD in software development or also called software QFD is given. The differences between classic QFD in manufacturing industries and software QFD are described. Following certain software specific QFD models (Zultner, Shindo, Ohmori, Herzwurm and Schockert), which can be considered as the most appreciated ones in theory as well as in practice, are introduced. Experiences in practice with these software QFD models are presented as well. Finally, through explaining the main principles of a special QFD variant for e-commerce, called continuous QFD (CQFD), we will show that QFD is suitable for planning electronic business applications as well.