Transforming Product Roadmaps Using Outcome-Based Planning

If your company relies on software to deliver value to your customers or to power your internal operations, you're a product company.

Your technology, if utilized effectively, should be an asset capable of scaling, optimizing, or streamlining a business at 2x, 5x, or 10x multiples of improvement. The ability to identify and activate valuable business levers through an intense focus on product and user experience is called “product-led growth” (PLG). According to OpenView, companies that focus on PLG strategies are over 2x more likely to be growing quickly (100%+ year-over-year revenue growth) than sales-led models.

From this perspective, it becomes easier to see how essential software can be for driving your most critical business metrics and objectives.

Making a good software product and supporting PLG strategy can be a big undertaking for an organization despite the clear benefits to the business. Both “tech native” companies and companies that have evolved to adopt software over time will often struggle for extended periods of time to fully realize the enormous upside potential of their technology investments.

Whether your software is first party or third party, you're likely familiar these common challenges that show up time and again preventing PLG strategies from taking hold:

To overcome these challenges, a strong product strategy—one that aligns the goals of the business, needs of the customer, and capabilities of the software—is absolutely critical for driving the intense focus required for teams to execute on this model.

Many organizations, however, suffer from a severe lack of leadership in this area and struggle to connect the dots between their goals and the technology and creating a scattershot approach to making product decisions.

If your current software team is failing to consistently deliver results or cannot articulate how their work ties to direct business value, how can you justify increasing investments into these teams? If you get 15 different answers for what value is being delivered to the customer, it's a clear sign the team has work to do.

It's a widely cited statistic that as much as 80% of new features added to a given software system have either no measurable impact or a negative result overall!

Companies and software teams tend to focus on the functional requirements of "what" to build at the expense of truly grasping "why" they are building the solution in the first place.

This means a roadmap based on "which features to build" as a planning technique is both risky and ineffective.

Instead, a key tool for driving PLG strategies in your company is the development of an outcome-based roadmap. By organizing work around desired outcomes—the measurable customer behaviors that ultimately drive value to the business—technology teams are able to focus on producing the smallest outputs that will be mostly likely to have the biggest impacts on the business.

The result is faster, strategically aligned delivery of software solutions that can be measured by the amount of business value they drive rather than just the number of features shipped on a timeline.

At Better Diligence, we've been helping companies transform from feature-oriented planning to an outcome-based approach that orients teams around key drivers of business growth and scale.

We call this the Rapid Roadmap. This lightweight planning framework is meant to be repeated as the market, your business, and your customer needs change and evolve quicker every day.

Whether you have a feature-based roadmap in place, different roadmaps depending on which team you ask, or no roadmap at all, we'll embed with your teams directly to facilitate the definition of your key product outcomes that form the backbone of your strategic technology initiatives.

To do this, we'll collect and review existing team roadmaps and discovery artifacts, review analytics and sales data, facilitate canvas-based planning workshops with stakeholders, and engage in customer discovery interviews to map key customer behaviors with their relationship to business results.

Once outcomes have been defined, we stand up this information in our executive-friendly Rapid Roadmap format that aligns time horizons, business objectives, outcomes, and solutions to enable immediate reprioritization of effort toward strategic goals—all within a matter of weeks specifically designed to coach and train teams to use the framework themselves. Accelerating, unblocking, or unlocking the potential of any team.