Your roadmap to success in three steps

Every collaboration, every project has a roadmap at our company. Why? A roadmap provides a clear and objective view of where an organization or digital service currently stands, and where that organization or service wants to grow. And a roadmap describes all the steps you will take between the starting point and the endpoint. By continually aligning each step with your ultimate goal, you consistently do the right thing and stay focused on the essentials. You do the right things at the right time. That's what we love!

A roadmap provides:

• clarity about the goal you are working towards,

• a smooth collaboration and agreement with the team and stakeholders,

• a continual reminder of what your goal was,

• small, manageable, and well-prioritized steps to reach that goal,

• easy adjustments if you find out along the way that something doesn't work or isn't right, or when you gain new insights.

Let's get started! These three steps will help you lay the foundation of a roadmap

Determine starting and ending points

A roadmap is not called that for nothing. It is a mapped out, structured route to your endpoint. But you can only determine that route if you also know from which point you are starting. The following questions help to determine the starting and ending points.

Where are you now?

This question pertains to the digital service you want to develop or improve. It doesn't matter whether you are developing an innovative digital service alongside your ongoing business, or if your ongoing business is a digital service that could use some innovation.

During the first roadmap session, it is important that you collectively—as a team and with stakeholders—get a realistic view of where you currently stand. It might surprise you, but within organizations, and even within teams, there are diverse perspectives on this. Share during such a session—and actually continuously—especially with each other where everyone individually thinks you currently stand. This leads to valuable conversations and insights!

Do you really want to get an honest picture? Then evaluate your view with data. Does the data show the same as what you think? Nick: “Knowing where you collectively stand, and therefore better knowing what needs to be done to get where you want to go, is, in my opinion, the best start to a project. Bringing out the starting point with data and research can itself be a step on the roadmap.”

What is our vision on the market?

And what role do we want to play in it?

These two questions form the basis for your goal on the horizon. The point you work towards, with the roadmap as a guide. It's about the goal, so: what do we want to achieve? This can range from very concrete to very abstract, for example: more conversions (such as registrations, matches, completed tasks, purchase of products), a validated (new) proposition, or a product market fit.

What if that vision of the market and the role you want to play in it are still unclear? Roel: “Not knowing is not bad. But it is important to be honest about it. Then you can look for the answer to these questions. For example, by investigating what your customers encounter, or by analyzing which themes affect your existing service offering. It may feel like an extra step, but trust me, pinpointing your answer to these questions is worth the investment twice over. It is a prerequisite for any successful innovation.”

Visualizing the real goal

A good example of the success of roadmaps is our collaboration with Roan Camping Holidays. The old website needed a good update. They had a million-dollar business on a non-scalable platform and were encountering limits. But was the removal of technical constraints really the starting point? Developing a website is not an end in itself, it is intended as a means for the customer and other stakeholders of Roan. During the first roadmap session, we reached the ultimate goal: ensuring that guests can spend as little time as possible booking and arranging their holiday, and as much time as possible enjoying the holiday itself. So: make it easy for them to book the best holiday from the start and to assist them during the holiday itself on location. Then we traced back to where the travel specialist currently stood. From there, we built step by step towards their end goal. The result includes a new website that works smoothly and a new roadmap with which we fully focus on the future.

Plot your roadmap

Are the start and end destinations clear? Then start plotting. How do you get from where you are now to your goal? What dependencies are there, so: what do you need to do or know first before you can proceed? This is how you create a list of items, each with its own priority.

How do you generate items for your roadmap?

The first steps on the roadmap are usually quickly identified because they directly follow from your research into where you currently stand. These steps need to be as clear as possible. Further along the roadmap, steps are often less concrete. Roel: “That's not bad. In fact, you probably can't help it. Because you continuously gather new insights along the way, follow-up steps become clearer and the path sharper. You need the results from the first steps to formulate later steps more precisely. Sometimes it turns out that, with three or four intermediate steps, you have really mapped out all the necessary information from your organization. Satisfied (for now)? Then you can sharpen your follow-up steps with all the data.”

What do you describe in the items on your roadmap?

It is important that you don't fill in the steps on your roadmap (only) based on feeling. Always substantiate steps with data. For each item on your roadmap, you describe at least:

• the reason for this step,

• what stakeholders, the end users, and the client will benefit from it,

• how you will measure success (be critical about this!),

• what the risks and opportunities are,

• what assumptions exist,

• the deadline and

• what effort is needed to address this/who is involved (users, team members, stakeholders).

  
  

Make it as manageable as possible. If you describe an item well, you quickly arrive at the tasks needed to achieve it. Roel: “You can't always eliminate assumptions and risks beforehand. However, it is a standard part of our approach to conduct experiments to test the assumptions. This way, we mitigate risks, and we further refine our roadmap based on new insights. Moreover, it helps just to be aware of the assumptions you have and to name them. Then you make a choice: we know this is happening, but we deliberately take it for granted. If something goes differently than expected, then you know that a risk or assumption from your list can explain it. This is also good for accountability to the rest of the organization. Super transparent, in other words.”

How do you determine the order of items on your roadmap?

Nick: “For all items, we weigh impact and effort against each other. We prioritize the items that deliver a lot of impact and relatively take little time. The matters that deliver significant impact but also require a lot of effort, we schedule or break into smaller pieces so that the effort also becomes lesser. Items that have little impact but also require little effort we do in between. And yes, the items that deliver little and require a lot of effort we simply do not do. Be cautious, because people are inclined to underestimate effort and overestimate impact. Therefore, also test these estimates with data or experiments, look back at the learnings from similar projects, and discuss with all stakeholders what their estimate of the impact and effort is.”

Quick adjustments with your roadmap

No matter how well you prepare, there are always things you haven't thought of. That is why it is so important to work towards your end goal in small, manageable steps. This was also evident at the freelance platform YoungOnes. “When we launched this platform, subscriptions poured in. Suddenly, it turned out many freelancers had not fully completed their profiles during registration, meaning their registration couldn't be completed,” Roel recalls. Because the team worked with a roadmap and step-by-step releases instead of a grand live launch, the problem became quickly apparent, and they could make timely adjustments with a few relatively simple modifications in the app.

Talk about it!

Establishing a roadmap at the beginning and then framing it and tying it up with a bow? Nope. It is not merely a creative exercise that you do at the start. The roadmap is a document that you continuously refer back to in order to keep your goal clear, and which you keep refining. It cannot be otherwise: the further you progress in the process, the more insights you gain. This may lead to different steps, or you can fine-tune the steps you formulated earlier. We typically spend a session each quarter thoroughly reviewing the roadmap with our clients. Are we still on track? Where is adjustment needed? Which steps need to be added or removed? Nick: “The roadmap guides everything we do. For example, scheduling what will be tackled in our sprints. This way, our clients know exactly what to expect. That's reassuring. A successful digital service doesn't appear overnight. By collaborating in this way, you always maintain control.”