Welcome to the 3rd installment of my series exploring using customer insights to define a strategy. In the first post here, I discussed why strategy is so important. In the second post here, I described how proprietary market and customer insights define what game you are playing and what the rules of the game are. Today I want to discuss how that strategy defines what winning looks like, specifically how the tie from strategy to product roadmaps and execution priorities. And I’ll explain why I believe a strong, customer-centric strategy actually improves culture.

What does a winner look like

Product roadmaps are admittedly a very difficult balancing act between near term technology or feature developments, and aspirational business objectives. However, if using the market and customer insights approach to developing your strategy that I described yesterday then you should have a very good idea of which market segments you can adequately served today, and which segments require new services, products, or channels to adequately serve.

Moreover, the pain points and jobs to be done that are uncovered during your customer discussions are key elements to drive your product roadmap. Focusing your roadmap and priorities on the customer pain points and those jobs to be done, rather than the widget that is being built, is critical to staying focused on the customers and markets that are driving the strategy rather than falling in love with the technology and solutions.

Don’t mistake activity for progress

When you have confidence and conviction in your strategy, you should be able to tie your entire product roadmap to that strategy. In the most extreme case, we asked product managers to link every user story and epic in the roadmap to one of our strategy pillars. While this may at first seem like overkill, the result was amazing in that it drove much stronger evaluation and customer-centric thinking in why we were spending money and resources on any particular development.

But even more powerful than the strategic thinking in the product roadmap is the alignment this creates across the organization, which fosters a strong culture. By articulating clearly the strategic driver behind each roadmap element, it creates a much stronger understanding and alignment amongst the entire development team as to the “why”. I have never come across an engineer who wasn’t thrilled to have a strong link and ability to articulate the strategic why and clear customer outcome that is enabled by her work. And that shared purpose and clear link back to the customer pain points we are solving creates ongoing cultural benefits.

This clear tie from strategy to roadmap also benefits the sales and marketing teams. It becomes so much easier to build customer excitement and interest around your roadmap and future when it is so clearly tied to a strategy that was based around those customers to begin with. So that clear link from strategy to roadmap is a huge benefit to the entire organization and company culture.

Of course strategy isn’t static, and there may be times that there is conviction in adding something to the roadmap that can’t be tied to part of your strategy. Sometimes this forces the tough prioritization decisions, and other times it forces an adaption of the strategy. But more on that in the next post about the importance of KPIs and metrics in executing on a strategy

Follow along and comment below if you want to learn more about this topic I’m so passionate about.

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