Boston Consulting Group (BCG) Growth Share Matrix Software; star, dog, problem child, cash cow; Companies that are large enough to be organized into strategic business units face the challenge of allocating resources among those units. In the early 1970s the Boston Consulting Group developed a model for managing a portfolio of different business units (or major product lines). The BCG growth-share matrix displays the various business units on a graph of the market growth rate vs. market share relative to competitors.