Now that you know how you are going to track the components of your stack(s), what are you actually going to track? Are you just going to track products in use, or are you also going to track products being evaluated and tested, and rejected and retired? Note: we recommend that you track all of this. By tracking what you are evaluating and testing, you will avoid multiple departments duplicating work. By tracking products that have been rejected or retired, you will avoid resurrecting products that have already been rejected when you evaluate products in the same category.
Are you going to create a single stack to track everything or a stack for each team, department, or geographical region?
Most often, we see organizations start with three stacks:
In an M&A environment, unless the two companies are going to remain independent and manage their own stacks, we recommend keeping it simple and starting with the three stacks above. You can always introduce additional complexity later.
