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Everyone loves a roadmap. Order in the face of chaos. Deliverables. Certainty. As Dan North says, we’d rather be wrong than uncertain.
Roadmaps in the age of OKRs
If you’re lucky enough to work in an organisation that has embraced the concept of outcomes over outputs, with measurable success criteria and projects expressed as hypotheses designed to lead to rapid learning and rapid impact, then you may be forgiven for thinking that you have outgrown roadmaps. But that isn’t the case. What you (should) have outgrown are fixed milestones and pretending you can predict the future and know what functionality is going to be needed when and in what order. But people still want to know what’s ahead.
In the spirit of “Plans are nothing. Planning is everything.”[1] we need some guiding lights along the way to assure us of the overall direction of travel. Having an overall North Star (excuse the pun) is crucial in ensuring that quarterly objectives have appropriate context rather than representing a random walk.
So how can we bring the two together - priorities driven by business outcomes and impact metrics, and the desire for ordered steps to follow? As I’m making my way through “Sooner Safer Happier” I came across an infographic [2] that resonated with me. The author betrays his long career working with large organisations, particularly global investment banks, and as a result a certain level of complexity leaks into the chart - portfolio epics, portfolio objectives, strategic objectives, initiatives… phew, how do you keep them apart?! But at its core the overview does something beautifully simple. It depicts value streams, associated products and the business outcomes attached to each:
One Step at a Time
At any one time there may be a number of business priorities that you are trying to address. The most effective way of working through these is to give teams focus and encourage them to work through priorities one at a time. Making a millimetre of progress in a thousand directions will not allow you to derive measurable impact quickly; it does the opposite. It delays value creation while at the same time leaving teams frazzled and overwhelmed as they’re trying to juggle a myriad of projects.
Instead we need to exercise our “Not yet” muscle - identify what is likely to give us the most bang for our buck, go after that outcome and shelve everything else under “Not yet”. Not yet does not mean never, it just means “We acknowledge this is an important subject but we believe that it is not quite as important as this other thing over here so we are going to work on that first.”
Longer Term Visibility
To support this sentiment an outcome-based roadmap similar to the one shown above will provide assurance to the organisation that their priorities are on the radar and will be worked on just as soon as the higher priority outcomes have been addressed. By laying out the outcomes we’re looking to achieve over a longer period of time we’re giving stakeholders certainty that their needs will be considered in due course and haven’t been forgotten about. It also provides teams with context beyond the immediate initiatives and enables some forward-thinking and good decision-making in the light of what may be around the corner.
As you set out to achieve your goals, ensure that you have a measurable way of verifying that you are on the right track, that the work you are doing, the functionality you are delivering, has the expected impact - or not. This allows you to work in a hypothesis-led way. If the features you are working on are not yielding the desired effect, go back to the drawing board and ask yourself what else you could try to move yourself closer to the desired business outcome. And conversely, if your delivery is having the desired impact (congratulations!) ask yourself at what point you have done enough. The law of diminishing returns, the good old 80:20 rule, is alive and well and there is an opportunity cost of pushing beyond the biggest impact results - over time you will need to expend more effort for fewer incremental gains. This may be the right thing to do given your circumstances, but reflect at regular intervals and be deliberate in your decision-making.
Where Next?
When you reach the point where your outcomes have “sufficiently” materialised, it’s time to look at your roadmap again and consider the next priority. At this point it is good practice to check that what we thought was the next-highest priority then is still the next-highest priority now. Circumstances change; markets, environments, competitors don’t stand still. Take stock, assess and then move forward again one outcome at a time.
This way of working will feel alien to a lot of people who are used to and dependent upon fixed projects with budgets assigned often months in advance. Those that seek solace in pre-planned milestones and “order” may feel a little uncomfortable in this new environment.
Give them time to adjust, provide frequent updates and focus on how the work you are doing is impacting business results in tangible ways. Milestones in their original meaning were quite literally heavy stone obelisks made from granite, marble or stone. They marked the distance along an already established route to an already established destination. Chances are the work you are doing isn’t as pre-determined as that but emergent, with the best path to take not necessarily clear ahead of time. So instead of milestones we need guiding lights along the way, metrics that will tell us whether we are making the desired progress in this current direction we’re pursuing, or whether we should try another path. If you focus on outcomes and measurable progress indicators along the way, you will end up miles ahead of what any roadmap could have predicted.
Get in touch if you want help implementing this way of working in your organisation!
[1] Dwight D. Eisenhower
[2] page 204, image adapted for simplification
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