How Roadmaps Help Create True Strategic Alignment
How Roadmaps Help Create True Strategic Alignment
3 tools to refine strategy and create good mid-term planning, empowering teams to achieve outstanding results
👋 Hi! Nacho here.
Before we start, I wanted to share that this week, I have been featured in Talking Roadmaps, and Agile Book Club. I had a wonderful time sharing my views on the insightful questions of my hosts.
In today’s article, I share lessons I gathered working with 70+ product teams for 15 years.
Now, I work 1:1 with product leaders to help them produce world-class performance.
The main ingredient I’ve observed for transformation in product teams is Outcome-orientation.
Let’s dive in & explore how the strategic roadmap serves as the cornerstone to unlock your organization's true potential.
Ps, read until the end for some bonuses on how to transform your organization.
Vision and strategy cover big-time horizons with a high flight level that is somewhat abstract, making it easier to understand that a low amount of detail is required.
Epics, Stories, and Tasks, are things we want to implement, and clearly need to be well-defined to be able to act on them.
Mid-term plans try to bridge what John Cutler describes as “the messy middle.” Items that provide direction, and clarify the outcomes we seek while keeping room for learning and defining the implementation with some discovery efforts.
They are so important because they build the bridge between the outputs and the outcomes.
The most fundamental change from the previous feature-oriented planning, or release plans, is that the items in our mid-term plans are opportunities or problems to solve, things we want to act on to achieve a desired outcome.
Extract From Product Direction
Outcome over Outputs
If there is a single attribute worth focusing on, that would be outcomes. We tend to discuss what the team will deliver, and while that conversation may be useful further down the road, it is not what we should cover during the direction definition.
You face several challenges to shift the discussion toward outcomes:
Trust: One of the hardest shifts is encouraging stakeholders and managers to discuss outcomes, not outputs, with product teams. They must trust the team to decide the best course of action to achieve the goal.
Outcome accountability: Similarly, it may be difficult for teams used to receiving and shipping requirements to take responsibility for selecting what to build and to become accountable for uncertain results that they may feel are outside of their control.
Reward results, not outputs: Most traditional organizational structures and processes are set up to optimize and reward delivery. Without changing these compensation tools, people will eventually fall back to focusing on shipping rather than impact.
Embrace uncertainty: This change in perspective is based on a context where we are unsure if what we want to build will have the expected impact. Failure and learning are required parts of the process, along with experimentation and rapid iteration, adopting new insights, and increasing the chances of achieving the expected results. We need to embrace this uncertainty about the solution, and we need to feel safe to “get out of the building and learn about it.”
Outcome-orientation is the single most crucial transformation a product organization can make, and the strategic roadmap can be a keystone artifact to achieve it.
How do you find those opportunities? By refining the strategy.
How do you refine the strategy? Using tools to break down our strategic drivers into more concrete options which will get us closer to the desired outcome.
The good news is that we likely used some of these tools when creating the strategy, for example:
Opportunity Mapping
Journey Maps
Slicing tools
1. Refining strategy with Opportunity Mapping
The tool I use more frequently to refine strategy is the top part of opportunity solution trees.
Your strategy will signal some desired outcomes that can be the top node of the tree.
From there, using the tree structure, you will have a breakdown of the opportunities or problems you are trying to solve to achieve those outcomes.
Let's review an example: a travel company I worked with had as a strategic driver reducing operation costs as a percentage of sales. They were not achieving profitable growth due to highly manual and time-consuming operations.
A few data points helped identify outcomes that could help achieve that impact:
The ratio of service calls per sale was higher than one, meaning every customer called us at least once after buying a service.
The number of automatically fulfilled sales was around 80%, below the industry standards.
Due to some complexities and suboptimal implementations, the accounting department manually conciliated more than 25% of service payments.
We went on to dig for more detailed information that helped us identify insights one step lower.
Taking the number of service calls, we identified that
70% of calls were to request information, way above the industry benchmark.
A high volume of calls was made long before using the service, resulting in more calls from the same customers.
Virtually no customers were using self-service post-sales options, and we had minimal capability to move customers from phone calls to online service requests. The industry benchmark was around 50% self-service.
Taking the high volume of information calls, the team explored user pains that were causing this friction:
Itinerary information was poor on the confirmation page and email.
Some of this information was needed even during the purchase flow.
Once the user discovered they needed more information, they had to wait for an agent to answer their questions.
These last-level opportunities in the tree are the ones that they used as near-term roadmap items.
2. Refining strategy with Journeys
A customer journey map describes a set of activities a user undertakes when using a product or service to achieve a goal, such as “search, compare, select, and view” when watching a movie through Netflix for entertainment. It has many uses and applications throughout the product development process.
After choosing your strategic driver, describing the journey can help you identify, at a lower level, which aspects of the experience can be improved to hit your desired outcomes.
We can, for instance, take a deep dive into a particular segment of the experience. Let’s use the example of reducing customer service information calls we discussed for the opportunity solution tree (and pretend we have not completed the tree!). Focusing on the part of the experience related to trip information, we arrive at this map segment:
As you can see, we are focused on a few activities of the purchase and after-purchase stages. Even in this short example, there are pain points unrelated to our goal of reducing customer service information calls. For example, our current direction ignores the “Payment stresses” (such as the input of credit card and billing details) that the traveler feels when completing the purchase. Since our strategic opportunity was related to providing more information to reduce the customer’s need to make a call, I used an “Info” circle sticker on all the activities aligned with our strategic horizons. We have identified four lower-level problems that we can use to populate our roadmap items with more precision.
3. Slicing strategy
Product managers have been using slicing for a long time in their agile practices to make user stories small enough to fit iterations while still adding value. Since we are trying to reach a finer granularity of our strategy, we can use similar techniques to identify items for the roadmap.
Some options for slicing are:
User segments: The effort required to solve a particular user segment problem may be quite different from what is required for the entire user base.
Geography: Split opportunities by city, country, region, or whatever division makes sense in your context. For example, a logistics product would require intense efforts to adapt to additional destinations. Dividing it to prioritize regions in the roadmap is very useful.
Operations: Many products cover multiple operations, such as “cancel, modify, return” orders in e-commerce or “create, modify, eliminate” in a files repository tool. Can you split those problems and focus on one at a time?
Workflow: As with the customer journey map, can we divide the work into stages and split the opportunities directed to each of them? Does it make sense to let the user book a table at a restaurant before we work on the step of searching restaurants nearby?
Variations: All the above options represent diverse needs that the product needs to cover. What are other potential variations in your scenario, and how can you slice the opportunities?
What if I don’t have a Strategy?
2 words: reverse engineer it.
I need to admit that most companies don’t have a product strategy 🙁
So you may wonder, should I give up on a mid-term plan?
Absolutely no!
By attempting to solve mid-term planning, you may begin a journey to build that much-needed strategy.
How do you reverse engineer it? We can use Martin Eriksson's decision stack to help us.
Start with your features. Ask why we are building this. It will tell you what opportunity or problem you are trying to solve.
Ask why this opportunity. It will tell you what goal or outcome you are trying to achieve.
Ask why this goal. It will tell you what strategies you are pursuing.
If you have five features and the answer to these “whys” results in 5 different strategies, then you have a good indication of lack of focus, and you can start discussing that with your leadership team.
Conclusion
You now have the tools to refine your strategy, going from high-level strategic pillars, which everyone nods and agrees to, into more concrete opportunities, making more explicit how you pretend to get to your outcomes and have more insightful debates with stakeholders to achieve accurate alignment.
Want help with the reverse engineering to create true strategic alignment for you & your teams?
I work with product leaders to produce world-class performing teams without any additional workload for you.
If you resonated with this post & want to be loved by your team for creating clear structures & leading with vision, I’m currently offering 5 free strategy sessions to help you:
Transform output-oriented teams into outcome-oriented teams
Shift from guess-based to data-driven decision-making
Place customer insights at the center of decision-making
Establish a robust strategy to minimize direction changes
You’ll get a tailored growth plan to incorporate the takeaways immediately.
Interested? Schedule in here: