Roadmaps promise to bring teams together. But its often treated like a checklist- a series of tasks on a deadline. This misconception has to go.
Bringing together every leader in the room is a tough job- all departments have their way of doing things, and none enjoys meddling.
And yet, the CMO and marketing leaders of most successful organizations need to bring these leaders together and create a smooth and efficient workflow. If a company must thrive against its competitors, this cross-departmental unity is vital.
From the product’s inception to its debut in the market, marketing leaders must craft cohesive strategies that help every leader be on the same page and operate at the same wavelength.
In order to do that, marketing leaders must rely on a roadmap.
Often, roadmaps are treated like checklists and disparate solutions, created to meet deadlines. There is no how, why, or what- just a when. This type of business thinking is detrimental to productive outcomes and sales of your product.
That is not to say you need to control everything down to the molecule, but enough that there is a cohesion of ideas and goals and wiggle room to change things in real-time.
This is the formula for a winning marketing roadmap.
A flexible strategy that adapts to your needs and aligns with every function in your organization.
Remember: A roadmap doesn’t fix the fundamental issues with organizational management. In the end, it is a tool. A powerful one, but a tool nonetheless. Its strength lies in opening channels for the actual solution: communication.
Marketing roadmaps are not mere checklists.
What is a marketing roadmap?
The B2B industry is a web of complex business functions, each serving a specific goal. However, without a cohesive vision and timeline, organizations would not be able to identify customer needs or provide the solutions needed to mitigate them.
To solve this key problem, strategists created a simple tool known as the roadmap that maps organizational efforts to a specific outcome on a timeline.
And no function owned the roadmap better than marketing. In the context of marketing, this roadmap is a start-to-end point of all business functions set on a timeline. It acts as a bridge between all tactical decision processes.
In simple terms, it is a strategic unifier that helps make sense of data gathering and market research to identify market needs and bring the product to market.
What are the benefits of a roadmap?
While the roadmap’s role is a unifying force, it’s not limited to it. It provides a molecular view into everything a leader would want to know.
The roadmap, if articulated and well-executed, will provide the following benefits (though there are more; here are six important ones)
- Prioritized goals and drivers
- The map provides a clear reason for why a certain plan exists, the way it should be executed, and the timelines it needs to follow.
- It lists the drivers for each goal and the people in charge of making it happen.
- Understanding Customer Needs
- With the roadmap, you can tailor your campaign to your customers’ real-time needs.
- Check whether the goals align with it.
- Evaluate if the campaign is meeting those needs.
- Craft and track KPIs that act as leading metrics of your campaigns.
- Visualization of competitor and trend analysis
- Windows Of Opportunity
- A well-designed roadmap enables marketing teams to find new windows of opportunity in their market.
- It has room to identify customer behavior and pivot or grow accordingly.
- This could be as early as market research or late-stage market penetration.
- Managing Key Accounts
- Often, sales and marketing might mistake two different ICPs as the key accounts- in short, a misalignment. The roadmap empowers teams to visually put their key accounts forward and reach sales and marketing alignment.
- That means identifying them becomes easier.
- Tracking their behavior with your offers and messaging becomes smoother.
- And helping teams attribute and define the behavior of key accounts.
- Identification of Developmental Gaps
- Each function of the roadmap also shows where your pitfalls are.
- Whether campaigns are working as intended and if everyone is on the same page and working towards a set goal.
- These could be product developmental problems with GTM motions that aren’t working as hypothesized.
- Mitigation Plans
- Once the developmental gaps are identified, the roadmap helps put mitigation plans in motion.
- This could mean following a different path or identifying new technologies needed to execute the strategy.
- Finding the benchmarks that have worked and which have not.
- Providing a clear visual of which stage has the gaps and needs further refinement.
And to top it all off, each function of the roadmap has a clear owner who can lead their team to achieve particular goals with a clear start and end time. Each roadmap function, though, has to be in sync with or else the purpose of the tool can be lost, becoming another “to-do” on your list.
How do you build your marketing roadmap?
Source:
First, let’s break down a very common myth- the Excel template you downloaded with a few sheets is not a roadmap. It could have been part of one. But it absolutely isn’t the roadmap.
Roadmaps are visual behemoths that drive strategy and tactical decisions. They are complex pathways of contingencies.
There is the Foundational Roadmap that encompasses all of your organizational goals. From your products’ or services’ inception to their phasing out- yes, big organizations plan for this too- this foundational roadmap will include CEOs, CFOs, and other stakeholders. It gives them a clear view of what is supposed to happen at each stage.
And the marketing roadmap’s job is to translate these overarching company goals into actionable marketing strategies and campaigns.
The Steps
The steps outlined here might seem like an over-simplification of the process, because it is.
These marketing roadmaps are living documents that can be created by the person who’s working on organization-specific goals. We’ll try to codify them here, but we highly recommend trying your mixes.
Tools needed to create a roadmap:
The roadmap is a living document that should, with approval, change in real-time. You will need tools to create documents nested in documents. Some of these are: –
You will have to create your stack for bringing your document to life. Usually, a mix of all of these is the right way to go. However, there is a flaw in using these tools: they are prone to clutter.
All tools, especially the ones that should bring organization, bring clutter because it becomes difficult to track- you should make sure the document is searchable. The tools give you a chance.
Creating the roadmap
- Create your foundational roadmap.
- This includes the steps you will be taking to execute your organizational goals.
- Assigning each stage to an “owner.” This could be the CEO for executive tasks, and the engineer for basic-level stuff.
- Map out each function’s final goal and timeline.
- Nest the marketing roadmap in it.
- Create a marketing roadmap inside the foundational one. This roadmap must reflect changes made to the foundational file.
- Inside this file, list the functions of your team and assign an owner to each function.
- Once set, create specific timelines and goals for the business outcomes you wish for.
- Set your goals.
- Create a SWOT analysis of your strategy and map it out based on the timeline.
- Create trackable KPIs, leading metrics that are bound by time and have historically served to identify the lagging metrics. E.g., brand awareness, social mentions, ROAS, etc.
- Create contingencies
- Use the KPIs and SWOT analysis to create contingencies.
- Prepare for communication failure and create metrics to identify failure. E.g., low CTR, lack of feedback, and social mentions.
If you think this is easy, odds are, you haven’t created a roadmap yet. Many successful products and marketing campaigns are built from roadmaps.
But again, this simple concept is quite deceptive. It often involves a clear understanding of your organization’s goal and cooperation from various teams. Without that, the roadmap is a vanity project.
Many organizations, however, have nailed the concept. They have realized that any roadmap is nothing but meticulous project management.
Roadmap Examples: Planning for Success.
AI has changed a lot, but one thing that has flown under the radar is this: CMOs are now large-scale project managers, weaving storytelling to drive revenue.
He says, “Product management is all about learning and adapting.” In this context, this quote by Lenny Ratchitsky makes ample sense.
And we can see that modern marketing has followed this structure. Great marketing is all about learning and adapting to customer needs and business priorities. And that’s what a roadmap does, it was originally a tool for the PM. Here are four great examples that will help you align your organization to its needs and priorities.
Netflix’s infamous roadmap- The financial side
Created by Gibson Biddle, the former VP of Netflix and former CPO of Chegg. He is credited with the rise of Netflix from 2m to 13m users.
In his medium post, he says, “The roadmap articulates the focus and organization of the product team. Completing the exercise is straightforward once the teams define the strategies, proxy metrics, and projects for their swimlanes. The roadmap is an artifact — an expression — of your product strategy.”
This tells us a vital thing: roadmaps are a simplification of organizational goals and outcomes, but only when organizations come together and define functions that will lead to their growth.
Yuriy Timen’s Grammarly Roadmap- The functional roadmap
Reforge has a comprehensive article on this roadmap. In essence,
- The roadmap includes broad functionality and moving upmarket with the B2B offerings.
- Getting constant input from the overall team and identifying the market opportunities.
- This roadmap doesn’t take prioritization into account- other forums and sub-roadmaps do.
- This one did not take stakeholder input into consideration.
Notion’s Roadmap Template- The Product
Nothing does nesting better than Notion. And this product roadmap is the perfect example of it. It looks very simple. It has basic Q1, Q2, and Q3 goals.
And while it is a product roadmap, personally, it is an actionable map that helps small teams manage their roadmap tasks and assign owners.
- It has nested documents.
- It’s easily editable.
- Completely free
- Customizable per individual tasks.
- If it’s for purely marketing purposes, you will have to change this template.
Initiative Strategy- A roadmap for strategy
From Lenny himself, the roadmap is the perfect example of how deceptive roadmaps can be.
Once you see the template, you will find a few functions inside it. They are blank but in it: –
- You can nest pages and turn them into wikis (the most powerful function of Notion for businesses)
- Each function can be assigned to an owner.
- The roadmap is stripped of the bloat so pervasive in living documents.
- Only vital documents can be added here with specific owners, directly assigning each function to each “owner.”
Here’s more to learn about PM and marketing planning:
The above resources might be for a PM, but will remain timeless principles for marketing to come.
Marketing roadmaps are a simplification of organizational alignment.
Organizational alignment is not an easy task. It is natural for conflicting ideas and creativity to clash with each other. However, that is detrimental to organizations that need success.
Product launches, new marketing campaigns, and quarterly goals, however, need that alignment. Everyone needs to know what the bottom line has to be. But if it’s not visualized, employees will lose sight of it and fall into entropy.
Roadmaps are an antidote to this problem. But it will always be a visualizer. Change will come from leaders changing siloed systems.
The roadmap, excuse the wordplay, is just the compass leading there.
