Reclaiming Your Roadmap (Part 1) – How Tactical Thinking Is Wrecking Your Roadmap
Strategic planning is one of the most important, and interesting, activities for senior leaders and their extended teams. While nearly all senior leaders acknowledge the importance of making time for strategic thinking and planning, 96% of senior leaders say they do not dedicate enough time to these activities. In fact, nearly 50% of senior leaders say they spend less than one day a month on strategy!
Most intelligent and thoughtful executives know that dedicating one day a month on strategy is not sustainable. So how do many of them implement a fix to this problem?
As a first attempt to create more time and space for strategic planning, many organizations put in place centralized control and decision-making over their planning processes. This includes strategic planning activities, like building a roadmap. Unfortunately, in an effort to standardize planning, a tactical mindset is applied to both strategy and execution, resulting in multiple incompatible objectives entering the strategic planning process.
Centralized Planning & Control Do Not Work
The future, which was once seen as open-ended and flexible, becomes decomposed into discrete chunks of work arranged into a deterministic schedule. Whereas success was once defined as serving the customer and creating market differentiation, now it is defined as conformation to the schedule. Finally, the fuzzy uncertainty that was once associated with strategic thinking is lost as strategic planning becomes yet another “check-the-box” activity.
While all this looks good on paper (or its digital equivalents), overusing the tactical mindset has two serious repercussions for the business. One, it doesn’t work! For all the emphasis placed on tactics, only 35% of businesses report meeting their deadlines “all” or “most of the time”. Two, rather than becoming more customer centric, the business becomes more reactive and slips further behind the competition.
- Unilateral creation: because strategic planning is centralized and controlled by those with a tactical mindset, other collaborators, such as marketing, sales, development, design, operations, support, customers, etc., are excluded from the process. Frequently, their needs are not reflected in the roadmap.
- List of features: in an effort to create the perfect execution plan, strategic objectives are broken down into smaller and smaller activities and subtasks. As the roadmap becomes crowded with implementation details, it becomes difficult to see the big picture.
- Infrequent updates: market conditions are never static, but many organizations update their roadmaps once, maybe twice, a year. This gives the impression business decisions are fixed rather than fluid. While business strategy is often stable over the course of a year, how that strategy is expressed can, and should, be reviewed quarterly.
- Trying to please everyone: in order for the business to differentiate itself and grow, it must be selective when deciding in what markets to operate and what customer segments to serve. Strategic planning is most effective when senior leaders use this time to identify what opportunities not to pursue. When tacticians control strategic planning, they waste precious resources trying to satisfy everyone’s needs, eroding the business’s competitive advantages.
Thank you for reading the first part of a three part series on how to reclaim your product roadmap. In the second part, I will explain why strategic planning is a complex problem that needs more than a tactical mindset.
