The art of strategy (Chapter 3: The Roadmap)

Preface

This is a sequel article, part 3 of 3. With this series I want to summarize my experiences and observations during 10 years of writing and driving strategy, creating a sort of manual. I hope the experiences shared in this writing will also be valuable for you and help you achieving your goals faster.

A good strategy is made of three pieces. A vision, a target state and a roadmap. That's it. You find part 1 about vision setting here, and part 2 about target state here).

And let's now continue with

Chapter 3: The Roadmap

The final piece of strategy is the roadmap. To be effective the roadmap needs to go beyond listing project names or project phases like "data gathering" on a time line. What is important is that the roadmap is fully routed in the vision and target state we talked about in the first two parts of this article series.

In my example in above cover picture we have the vision in the right top of the roadmap and the target state right next to it. For storytelling reasons we broke our target state into two. Reason is that our target state is a two-sided platform that joins service consumers with service providers and this means that we develop some products with the service consuming employees in focus, and other products with the service teams in focus. The two audiences have different language, pain points and interests and therefore wording two target states appeared to be the right choice for us, even though in reality it's only different perspectives on the same future. Unless you have a large organization with more business units, I would not advise to have several separated target states at the same time as this invites for diluted focus and workload within the organization, also for priority and resource conflicts across teams. If you are looking for a full example of target state, you find the employee&leader facing one in the "personal story" within the previous article "Chapter 2: Target State".

The Target State bubble(s) needs to be clearly named and briefly described, even on the roadmap itself. To aid this, I not only added a description box but also little bubbles where each one highlights a key feature / unique aspect of the Target State. With these tweaks your roadmap carries your vision and your target state in a clearly, ideally self-explanatory way. Again for scaling reasons.

Moving on, to the rest of the picture: We talked about that the target state helps you identifying where to invest and where not to invest your money. Essentially, use it to break down what products / areas to work on and how to connect them. You can use the roadmap to summarize the output of that reflection.

For each Target state aspect we defined products and for each of those products we laid down the development path until reaching the target state. We also drew interconnections in between products to highlight collaboration areas. The clear link between products and aspects of the target state visually documents the important place and role each team has in the big picture. This helps motivating the teams as well as keeping them focused.

A strategy 1-pager

We talked about the vision statement being able to scale the activating power of stirring speeches; the roadmap can not only provide an overview of the project phases / go-lives, but actually can summarize your full strategy (e.g., with the target state bubbles and sub-bubbles described above) and thus scale the entire strategy beyond the few meetings in which you explain it. See your roadmap as your strategy 1-pager. It allows you to briefly get your audience on board with your long-term direction before diving into the plan to get there. It keeps the target state in a crisp and clear way in front of all your teams working with you on achieving it. Also, with the colour code showing what's done, initiated or only planned, you even can use it as status report (ultimately a mix of what's done on time, where are we behind and what's next). When you use the roadmap for all these purposes you keep it always in front of people and thus strengthen the strategy effect on focus. You also save time by avoiding to prepare multiple documents and keeping all of them updated and in sync. Some of the tasks are even achieved better - for instance few status reports visually show next steps and how they connect; also few status reports remind the audience of where are you actually going with all of it.

Make your roadmap your strategy 1-pager.

Link to OKRs

Again back on the OKR topic. For what you put on the roadmap you actually have two options. You either can have quarter objectives lined up until achieving the overall objectives in the target state. Typically, teams set every quarter an OKR, and anchoring those "Os" on the roadmap, they are easily coordinated across teams and all in line with strategy. Or you can map the key results, the "KRs", on the roadmap body. Key results are for instance "achieve 30% adoption", "reach 1 EURm sales", etc. When you are working with KRs, this is a pretty good option because this way you have all on 1 page and keep people focused on what success means in metrics.

Closing remarks

I spend many years with strategy processes that took easily 6 months, then you continue with translating into portfolio for another 6 months and start over again. So when are you doing the work? Reason for such long time is often that you want to analyze everything, that you want to activate half of the organization to chip in problems or also solutions, you want to derive all sort of initiative options and then properly evaluate and finally prioritize all of that. You want to minimize the risk of getting it wrong.

Meanwhile, I believe, you don't need all of this. In the last three years I fundamentally changed my approach to strategy, and I love what I saw.

Above I did not talk about a full fledged trend analysis, a deep understanding of status quo, a proper gap analysis, an academic derivation of initiatives, etc etc. You need three simple things: a vision, a target state and a roadmap. You could even write this within 1 day.

The absolute key is: strategy is a set of choices which you arrive at through a series of discussions with affected people.

So make your strategy an emerging strategy, where you start with an educated guess on vision, target state and path, and then frequently check-in. In operationalizing your strategy it's a good idea to frequently repeat the roadmap as a strategy 1-pager with yourself, with your stakeholders, with your team leads so that the many learnings each team does day in day out can be regularly reflected against the target state. This helps to live the focus, but also - when new facts arise - allows you to collaboratively tune or even adjust the target state. Also it's a good practice to regularly connect all team leads for roadmap updates, planning and reviews to ensure that no team operates in isolation. There is no way that you know all products you need on the first day of your journey, and there is also no way that you see all collaboration areas across teams on the first day of your journey. Thus, test & learn over rigid plan, discussion & collaboration over paper.

I wish you a very successful strategizing and anxious to hear back from you on what you will learn!

Follow me if you are interested in more posts on strategy, leadership and agile.