What's the best way to manage a patent portfolio for a mid-sized tech company?

A mid-sized tech company manages a patent portfolio well by filing for business impact, not activity: each application should map to a product line, a competitor risk, or a licensing plan, not simply "we invented something." A single system tracking every deadline, office action responses, national phase entries, maintenance fee due dates, is what separates an asset from a liability, since a missed deadline abandons the application regardless of how good the invention was.

Quarterly reviews against the current product roadmap and competitor filings catch two things spreadsheets miss: patents worth pruning because they're no longer strategically relevant, and gaps worth filing before a competitor does. Ownership matters as much as process, someone needs clear authority to approve or decline a filing, or the portfolio drifts toward whatever engineers happen to disclose that quarter.

‍