---
title: "Product Inventory"
area: products
order: 1
lastUpdated: 2026-03-21
updatedBy: Claude (COO)
---

## Overview

The Product Inventory is a structured catalogue of all digital products in your organization. Every product has a lifecycle stage, an operational status, and links to its portfolio, taxonomy classification, and associated backlog.

## Key Concepts

- **Lifecycle Stage** — Where the product is in its development and operational life: Plan, Design, Build, Production, or Retirement.
- **Status** — The current operational state: Draft (not yet active), Active (in use), or Inactive (paused or decommissioned).
- **Stage-Gate Readiness** — A checklist of criteria that must be met before a product can advance from one lifecycle stage to the next. Gates ensure quality and governance before promotion.
- **Taxonomy Attribution** — Each product is tagged with nodes from the DPPM taxonomy tree, enabling comparison with similar products and portfolio-level filtering.

## What You Can Do

- Browse all products with filtering by lifecycle stage, status, portfolio, and taxonomy
- View a product's full profile including its health metrics, linked backlog items, and architecture models
- Check stage-gate readiness and see which criteria are outstanding before the next stage
- Advance a product through lifecycle stages once gate criteria are satisfied
- Register a new product and assign it to a portfolio and taxonomy category
