Reclaiming Your Roadmap (Part 2) – Strategic Planning is a Complex Problem

Welcome to the second part of my three part series on how to reclaim your product roadmap.  In the first part, I identified how a tactical mindset erodes the ability of a business to use their roadmap to realize their strategic goals.  In this part, I am going to explain why organizations need to push aside the tactical mindset during strategic planning.

The Status Quo is Broken

According to the Product Board, nearly 50% of senior leaders feel that their roadmaps do not reflect the needs of their customers (or end users) nor align with their long-term business strategy.  Wow…that’s a big number.

The first step to changing this dynamic is to recognize and acknowledge that strategic planning is a complex problem which cannot be solved with the tactical mindset that brought us here.

Complex Problem Defined

So what is a complex problem?  A complex problem is any new or unusual problem where you cannot know the solution up front.  To understand a complex problem, you must explore it from a variety of perspectives.  Because no one person can see the entire problem, everyone must contribute their perspective to create a shared understanding of the scope of the problem.  As the group engages with the problem, their understanding of the problem, and the problem itself, changes and is refined.

However, no business exists in a vacuum.  As your business tries to create a solution, your competitors are also trying to solve the same problem.  As customers engage with your competitor’s solutions, this influences their behavior and drives a competitive response by your business.  Therefore, a complex problem is also a problem that changes over time.  Unfortunately, as the problem changes, your initial strategic planning becomes obsolete and must be updated.

Roadmap is the Glue to Connect Strategy with Tactics

In the context of strategic planning, a roadmap is the glue which connects two parts of the business that are in flux: strategy and tactics.  In a modern enterprise, strategy and tactics have the capacity to work independently.  As a result, the two must be periodically realigned to ensure consistency, focus and direction.

When business undertakes the task to realign the two, the purpose is not to force strategy to conform with the tactics.  The purpose is to realign tactics, resources and people to the strategy, if the strategy is still valid.  If not, update the strategy to reflect the new direction.  In either case, a roadmap is the artifact which documents the updated agreement between strategy and tactics.

Thank you for reading the second part of a three part series on how to reclaim your product roadmap.  In part three, I will share The Scrum Academy’s four step approach to creating a successful collaborative roadmap.

If you can’t wait and want to download the complete whitepaper now, you can do that here.