Review Your Product Roadmap for Cash Flow Sustainability

This post is part of a series: The Startups Playbook for Cash Flow Sustainability , where I've broken down the key areas of focus and actionable steps that cash-burning startups need to take right now.

Achieving cash flow sustainability is a complex process, but nonetheless, an important strategic goal for any startup. The first step is to lay out a strategy that identifies the steps you need to take. Among those steps, one of the first places you should take a closer look is your product roadmap.

Your product roadmap provides high-level visibility of the entire product lifecycle, including timelines, research and development, planned features, key initiatives, and more.

About half of these (40-60% varying by industry) will never make it to market. The goal here is to identify which products have the best chance of getting there (and being profitable).

Review Your Product Roadmaps

Start by looking at your products. Review your product roadmap with an eye toward return on investment (ROI). The thing that really burns cash is the novelty of big trends that don’t pay off. If you have six projects that you can bring to market in the next 18 months–sit down and do an analysis to see which ones have the best commercial viability.

Ask questions like:

• Does this product have a well-defined market that’s ready NOW?
• Is the product easy enough to understand? Will your sales team be able to quickly learn about it and sell it?
• What does your product sales cycle look like? Is it long or short?
• Do you have products in the same family? Can you combine resources?

Do not let perfect be the enemy of good–push your R&D teams to release viable products when they work and address a need. You can continue to improve the product after it starts producing revenue,?as long as it is producing revenue.

Your product roadmap will help you narrow your focus. From here, you can realign resources. Costs that do not directly match your goals should be eliminated.

Continue reading more about the tactical steps for achieving cash flow sustainability with The Startups Playbook for Cash Flow Sustainability from Embarc Advisors.