You’ve crafted a detailed roadmap for your digital strategy, organised by impact and effort. This should pave the way to digital success, yet in practice things often go awry. How can you ensure that your roadmap genuinely delivers value?
No matter how beautiful your plan, without action it will lead to nothing — it’s all about execution. When running multiple projects simultaneously, you need an overview to plan time, budget, and manpower effectively: the roadmap. At its most basic, a roadmap can be a task list indicating what needs to be developed and done.
However, we often see that management’s ad-hoc demands take precedence, disrupting the plan.
Whilst it’s important to be responsive to management direction, if not aligned with your roadmap a lot can go wrong: stakeholders aren’t consulted, alignment with business goals isn’t considered, and priorities aren’t verified. This way, you don’t build nearly as much value for your customers. If you aim for true success as an organisation, consider the following best practices to align your roadmap and strategy.
Your digital strategy outlines how the organisation will achieve its goals, and the roadmap translates this into practical tasks over time. In practice, this connection is not alway obvious. Execution then gets mired down in detail, and the strategy remains abstract. So, how do you make this connection?
You do this with KPIS — Key Performance Indicators — that represent your goals, such as NPS (Net Promoter Score) for customer satisfaction. Start with a baseline, work on adjustments that positively influence the NPS, and then measure again. This way, you steer towards evidence and performance. Actions that won’t improve your KPIs shouldn’t take priority — no matter how loud someone shouts.
In a hierarchical organisation, management dominates, which doesn’t always benefit decision-making. A primarily execution-focused team may find it difficult to bring their expertise into the decision-making process. Yet, expert knowledge is often essential to assess priorities effectively.
When the roadmap is linked to the digital strategy and the underlying KPIs are clear, the next step is to choose actions that create the necessary value as efficiently as possible.
Ideally, your digital strategy is developed by a multidisciplinary team from a holistic vision. This ensures that everyone in the organisation is aligned. In practice, different departments may have their own goals, possibly even conflicting goals. For example: one department has an objective of increasing online sales while physical stores are judged on direct sales. Viewing from the whole and aligning goals is the first step.
Another point of contention can be determining the relevance and timing of actions. What is most important to do now? Departments deeper within the organisation often have a different view than those with ongoing customer contact. Tools such as McKinsey’s three-horizons model can help distribute attention. This sets multiple points on the horizon based on expected impact: current activities (horizon one), near-future activities close to your business (horizon two), and new directions (horizon three).
Does an action still seem too abstract? Then, as an organisation, you must first discover its true importance.
A common problem arises when features are demanded under pressure and then implemented without further consultation. In this scenario it can be tempting to adopt the attitude to “just come up with something, they’ll want something else soon anyway.” Whilst this can be easier, it creates an environment where the HIPPO prevails without answering the real question: how does this action contribute to the organisation’s goals? Answering this question requires calm and reflection in the form of discovery. Compare it to wanting to renovate your house. What exactly? An extension? With or without a skylight? Garden doors? What’s the cost and what do you want to achieve?
Making actions discussable makes them tangible, especially when done with stakeholders. This clarifies consequences and conditions early on, allowing the right choices to be made. This prevents things from ending up on the backlog without any prior testing, saving unnecessary work later on.
Change is inevitable. The key is to regularly adjust as an organisation. You can recalibrate the roadmap with periodic vision sessions. Review the items and evaluate them based on value. Can you combine items? Remove some? Move something forward? Is discovery needed somewhere? Should we first run an A/B test for verification? Is this still the best approach to achieve our digital strategy?
This creates calm and ensures you continue working on the most valuable matters. It’s also a good moment to evaluate: did the delivered actions and features meet expectations? Are we on the right track?
A roadmap is far from a task list, release plan, or planning tool. It’s a broad instrument for alignment, prioritisation, communication, and tracking progress. Given its various roles, it works well to structure your roadmap practically, such as using Teresa Torres’s opportunity solution tree.
This visualisation starts with the desired outcome as the trunk, followed by ‘opportunities’ formed by your customers’ pain points and needs. Fulfilling these helps achieve the desired outcome. Below, you place solutions to reach these opportunities, followed by ‘assumption tests’ to validate the solutions. This approach ties in with set goals and takes customer needs as the starting point, not the solutions.
Every organisation operates in a specific way, reflected in the roadmap. Changing this means achieving a cultural change. The roadmap consists of various goals, but ultimately, it’s not about the goals themselves, as they come and go. It’s about the underlying system, how effectively you set goals as an organisation, and how you work towards them. Achieving your goals is actually a secondary gain.
A great way to continuously work on improvement is the one-percent rule as explained in James Clear’s bestseller Atomic Habits. If you improve by one percent each day, you’ll be 37 times better after a year. So, want more control over the roadmap? Start by implementing small improvements and gradually transform your roadmap into the instrument for digital success.
If you’re looking to start your journey towards data-driven decision making and get your business on track for digital success, or if you’ve built a continuous product development function and want to know what the next steps are, we’re here to help.
Get in touch for a no-strings chat with a member of our team.