Software product line (SPL) development is a new approach to software engineering which aims at the development of a whole range of products. However, as long as SPL can be useful, there are many challenges regarding the use of that approach. One of the main problems which hinders the adoption of software product line (SPL) is the complexity regarding product management. In that context, we can remark the scoping problem. One of the existent ways to deal with scoping is the product portfolio scoping (PPS). PPS aims to define the products that should be developed as well as their key features. In general, that approach is driven by marketing aspects, like cost of the product and customer satisfaction. Defining a product portfolio by using the many different available aspects is a NP-hard problem. This work presents an improved hybrid approach to solve the feature model selection problem, aiming at supporting product portfolio scoping. The proposal is based in a hybrid approach not dependent on any particular algorithm/technology. We have evaluated the usefulness and scalability of our approach using one real SPL (ArgoUML-SPL) and synthetic SPLs. As per the evaluation results, our approach is both useful from a practitioner's perspective and scalable. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.