31/10/2025
Results-oriented roadmap - a link between strategy and operational activities
31/10/2025
Every company - regardless of industry - has a vision for growth. In manufacturing, we're talking about digitization, B2B self-service and improving the customer experience; in energy, we're talking about new service models and integrated customer relationship management. To compete effectively, organizations must not only set strategic directions, but also be able to execute them.
The problem is that there is often a gap between strategy and implementation. The strategy is sometimes accurate, but too general for teams to know how to translate it into day-to-day operations. At the same time, many projects running in parallel do not support the company's key goals. What's missing is a tool that connects vision to action and helps assess whether efforts are actually moving the organization forward.
That tool is a results-oriented roadmap - a way of planning that translates strategic goals into measurable results, manages change and clearly communicates its meaning at every level of the organization.
Why Companies Are Turning to Roadmaps More Often?
The environment in which manufacturing and energy companies operate today has become incomparably more complex and dynamic. More and more competition is appearing on the market at an ever faster pace. This makes the market leaders in each industry, wanting to maintain their position, also have to accelerate. They are starting to implement large projects in different areas of the company at one time. Digitization of sales, Omnichannel, automation and digitization of processes, new business services, regulatory changes - these are just the tip of the iceberg.
What is the effect of this?
First, the growing complexity and dependency of ongoing projects. Many companies have dozens of initiatives running in parallel by different departments - IT, marketing, sales, customer service. In this flurry, it is easy to lose sight of what is really important.
A natural corollary to this situation is the difficulty of transparently prioritizing and sequencing activities within the company. In practice, many organizations react to immediate needs instead of focusing on activities that have the greatest impact on strategic goals.
In addition, such a dynamic environment makes it difficult to communicate and collaborate between different company departments. This, in the long run, leads to growing frustration and reluctance to act. For many people, the question arises, "Why try to do again something that has already failed several times?"
Why Do So Many Companies Struggle to Build a Roadmap?
The roadmap itself is not a new tool. Most companies use some form of it in their daily operations – from simple Kanban boards to detailed Gantt charts. So why do so many organizations still struggle to create and maintain them? As always, the devil is in the details – in this case, in how the roadmap is used. Based on experience with many companies across industries, we can identify four common patterns that often prevent effective roadmap management.
Making Strategic Decisions Based on a Task Backlog. In many organizations, strategy doesn’t emerge as a thoughtful plan but as the sum of ideas and initiatives proposed by different departments. Each area has its own list of “things to do”: marketing plans a campaign, IT implements a new system, sales wants to improve the quotation process. These actions are usually beneficial, but if they’re not linked to overarching business goals, it’s difficult to assess their actual value or cost. Over time, the list of projects grows. Leadership starts making decisions not based on strategic direction but on what’s “loudest” or most urgent. Instead of managing the company’s growth, they end up managing a backlog — a collection of tasks that are hard to evaluate in terms of long-term business impact.
Operating at Too High a Level of Abstraction. Many strategies include goals such as “we want to be the innovation leader in our industry,” “we put the customer at the center,” or “we’re transforming how we deliver value to end customers.” The problem begins when these statements aren’t backed by clearly defined actions. Employees understand the direction but don’t know how to translate it into daily decisions. Department heads can’t clearly distinguish which projects are truly strategic and which are merely supportive. Teams are given a general goal like “improve the customer experience,” but without specifying what that means in practice — shorter service times, greater automation, or better user onboarding? The absence of specific, well-planned initiatives weakens the strategy’s power. People start to see it as a collection of vague declarations rather than a practical tool. As a result, each department interprets it differently, leading to diverging understandings of the same strategic direction.
Using Static Documents to Create a Roadmap. Just a few years ago, a roadmap was often treated as a one-time document — a presentation summarizing a multi-year plan. The issue is that in today’s world, the pace of change is too fast for such a document to remain relevant for more than a few weeks. Companies that still create static roadmap documents quickly realize that they lose connection with reality. One major change — such as a shift in investment priorities or a new business model — can render the entire concept obsolete. In practice, with static roadmaps, no one ever goes back to review them.
Building the Roadmap Within a Very Narrow Team. Quite often, the process of building a roadmap happens in a one-sided manner – a single strategic department or a small decision-making group sets the directions and communicates them. This approach is natural and has its benefits: it ensures consistency of vision and allows for quick decisions. However, it’s crucial to involve operational-level employees as well as external experts, whose unique perspectives can provide critical insights and reduce risk later in the implementation stage. Unfortunately, in many companies this step is still overlooked or introduced too late — when it’s already difficult to adjust the main strategic directions.
The Solution?
Building an Outcome-Oriented Roadmap Based on a Proven Process.
Most companies start with a functional approach. They create a list of projects and features they want to implement: a new portal, a CRM system, or a complaint-handling tool. Each of these initiatives makes sense – but only if we know why we are doing it.
A functionality-based roadmap has three main problems:
it focuses on what we do, not why we do it,
it leads to uncontrolled expansion of the feature list,
it’s hard to link activities to real business value.
An outcome-oriented roadmap works the other way around: it starts with goals and only then defines the actions needed to achieve them. Each initiative is linked to a measurable KPI that shows its impact on the business and the customer experience. In practice, this shifts the discussion from “what are we implementing?” to “what do we want to achieve?”. As a result, the roadmap becomes a tool for managing value – not just a project plan.
How to Build an Outcome-Oriented Roadmap – 4 Key Steps
Building an outcome-oriented roadmap requires the right approach, structure, and the engagement of the right people at the right time. Like any well-organized project, the roadmap creation process should have a dedicated owner. Their role should focus primarily on guiding the organization through each step of roadmap creation. To ensure all assumptions are met, it’s best to rely on a proven process. Below are four main stages that practically describe the key activities needed to develop an outcome-oriented roadmap.
Preparation and Communication
Every effective roadmapping process should begin with thorough preparation. This stage is often skipped for the sake of saving time, but in practice, it should serve as the foundation for all further work. Without it, the roadmap remains a set of assumptions detached from the organization’s day-to-day reality.
The first step is to organize knowledge. Every company has valuable information – from strategies and reports to customer data and notes from previous projects. The problem is that this knowledge is scattered: some in spreadsheets, some in presentations, some in the heads of managers. Bringing it together in one place helps build a common starting point and a shared understanding of what we already know, what works, and what needs to change.
The second key element is the so-called “Goals and Needs Workshop,” where key representatives from different departments – business, IT, marketing, customer service, or logistics – meet to align perspectives. This is the moment when multiple viewpoints merge into a single vision. Through such discussion, the organization determines where it wants to go and how it intends to measure success. Asynchronous work at this stage rarely succeeds – live dialogue helps uncover interdependencies, tensions between departments, and reduces future risks.
The next step is internal communication – clearly explaining why the roadmap is being created, what the rules for selecting initiatives are, and what the organization stands to gain. Transparency from the outset increases engagement and helps avoid a situation where the roadmap becomes “a document for management only.”
In parallel, the technological environment should be reviewed. Ambitious strategic goals must rest on realistic foundations – systems, integrations, and data that make it possible to deliver value. Often, the first result of the roadmap should be precisely to strengthen these technological foundations.
A crucial part of preparation is also analyzing the customer’s voice. This is when the company should confront its plans with reality – to see how customers actually perceive its products and services. Both quantitative (from websites, stores, call centers) and qualitative data (interviews, usability tests, customer journey maps) are used. Combining these sources provides a full picture of the experience and helps identify which moments in the customer lifecycle require improvement.
Finally, it’s worth summarizing these insights in the form of a Customer Journey Map, which connects different departmental perspectives and assigns initiatives to specific stages of the customer relationship. This ensures the roadmap is grounded in real needs from the start, not assumptions.
The preparation and communication phase is the foundation of the entire process. It organizes knowledge, builds shared understanding, and sets direction for further work. It’s the first moment when the organization starts acting not in silos, but as one team that knows why it’s creating the roadmap and how it will achieve its goals through it.
Defining Outcome-Oriented Initiatives and Prioritization
This is the stage where the roadmapping process takes real shape. At this point, we move from a list of ideas and projects to clearly defined outcomes that can be measured in practice.
Outcomes should be defined through their impact on customers and the business – for example, reducing delivery times, improving NPS, increasing online sales, or reducing the number of customer service inquiries. Only then should we decide which initiatives will help achieve these outcomes – “should we implement a new platform” or “modernize the CRM”? The starting point should always be the question “what result do we want to achieve?”, not “what will we do?”.
To make outcome-oriented initiatives effective, each one should have a defined success metric (KPI). A good practice is to choose metrics that the company can measure from the very beginning, and only later – as digital capabilities and data maturity grow – focus on more detailed analytics. Goals based on unavailable data quickly lose value and become purely aspirational. It’s better to start with simple, well-known metrics that can be easily applied in practice.
Once the outcome-oriented initiatives and their metrics are defined, it’s time for initial prioritization. This is the moment of choice – deciding which actions will deliver the greatest impact for a reasonable amount of effort and cost. Visual tools such as the Value–Effort or Impact–Risk matrix help clearly identify what should be implemented first and what can be postponed.
Prioritization, however, is not just analysis – it’s also a conversation about balance between quick wins and long-term strategic projects. Quick wins build engagement and trust, while long-term initiatives ensure lasting results and sustainable growth. Focusing exclusively on one of these approaches inevitably leads to imbalance.
Complex scoring models aren’t necessary. Better results come from collaborative discussions among managers from different departments – that’s when the organization begins to view initiatives systemically, not as isolated projects. In summary, this stage should conclude with a shared understanding of what truly matters and what will move the organization closer to achieving its defined strategy.
Designing and Validating the Roadmap
This is the stage where the previously defined goals, priorities, and outcomes take concrete form. The purpose of this phase is to translate the strategic vision into a realistic action plan that the organization can effectively implement.
A key principle: a roadmap should not be built according to a calendar, but according to business logic. Instead of thinking in months and quarters, it’s better to use the Now / Next / Later approach, which organizes initiatives in a flexible yet clear way. The “Now” horizon usually covers what can be achieved in the next few months, “Next” – the steps that follow, and “Later” – long-term initiatives that require prior organizational preparation.
This structure allows organizations to maintain a balance between having a transparent plan and preserving flexibility in decision-making over time. With this approach, the roadmap becomes both a strategic decision-making tool and a solid foundation for more detailed work schedules.
It’s also important to group initiatives by strategic domains – such as sales, customer service, data, or technology. This way, the roadmap shows not just a list of projects but also how the organization intends to deliver value to its customers through the synergy of key departments.
It’s essential to maintain a balance between technology and business value. The primary goal of technological solutions should be to support business objectives, not replace them – every initiative should have a clearly defined business outcome, not just a technical deliverable.
The next step is mapping dependencies between initiatives. Many projects are interdependent – for example, before developing a new feature, integrations or data structures may need to be prepared. Awareness of these dependencies is crucial for minimizing risk and setting the right sequence of actions.
The final stage is the validation of the prepared roadmap – the moment of confirming it with key stakeholders, establishing a shared starting point for further work, and building collective ownership of the plan.
Execution and Performance Monitoring
One might think that presenting the roadmap marks the end of the process – in reality, it’s only the beginning. The true value of a roadmap emerges when it starts functioning as a management tool.
At this stage, the roadmap should become part of the organization’s daily rhythm. It requires regular reviews – ideally at least quarterly – among key stakeholders. The goal of these reviews is not merely to update deadlines but to evaluate whether priorities remain relevant, whether the market environment has changed, and whether the strategy needs adjustment.
From this point forward, the roadmap should be continuously updated and connected to ongoing projects. It’s worth maintaining a logical link between the roadmap and the company’s operational tools (e.g., Jira or Azure DevOps) to ensure consistency between the strategic level (“why”) and the operational level (“what” and “how”).
In later stages, it’s crucial to focus reporting on outcomes rather than the number of completed tasks. This distinction between activity and effectiveness makes it easier to make informed decisions about changing priorities.
With this approach, the roadmap becomes part of everyday communication and collaborative planning. It helps maintain transparency of goals and a clear understanding of purpose. It’s not a document but a compass that helps the company consciously shape its future.
How to Scale the Process
From Small Steps to a Complete Roadmap
Roadmapping is often perceived as a complex process that requires extensive involvement and many decision-makers. And indeed – in its full form, it encompasses multiple perspectives and demands strong coordination. However, not every organization needs to start at such a large scale.
Many companies are only beginning to mature toward this way of working – sometimes they lack time, resources, or simply readiness. That’s why it’s often better to start small – with a short “Fast Track” project focused on one selected business area or a specific customer problem.
Such an accelerated process usually lasts from several to a dozen days. The goal is not to create a complete roadmap but to test the approach with a selected group of people: gather data, build shared understanding of needs, and develop initial outcomes. This allows the organization to see in practice how the process works before scaling it company-wide.
This approach also has significant cultural value. It helps “normalize” the idea of roadmapping – showing that it’s a practical method of organizing activities and giving them meaning. Often, after the first pilot, new energy emerges within the organization: teams themselves want to continue developing the process.
As the company gains experience and confidence, it naturally transitions to the full process, incorporating data analysis, technology, customer experience, and linking initiatives to strategic goals. At that point, the roadmap becomes a means of managing change, not a one-time project.
Regardless of scale, the idea remains the same: the roadmap bridges vision and action. Sometimes it’s enough to start with a smaller scope or a single problem – but even that can effectively drive organizational change, shifting the mindset from “what we do” to “why we do it.”
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