Webinar: How to create a digital roadmap

Sean - 00:01
Hello and welcome to part two of our roadmapsession webinars.
This session is going to focus on the digital roadmap and how you can create adigital roadmap that delivers on your corporate strategy.
If you haven't done so already, I recommend watching the discovery webinarbefore this one as that actually goes into how we get those problems andsolutions that go into the roadmap.
So it probably will make a little bit more sense if you watch that one first.
To go on to the intro and what we're hoping to learn, I'm asking for 20 minutesof your time and we're going to break down strategy and why a digital roadmapwill help you hit your business goals, the common pitfalls and how to avoidthem, how a digital roadmap will deliver corporate strategy
successfully.
We're going to go for a brief recap of the discovery process as covered before.

Sean - 01:00
And then how a digital roadmap links with effective discovery sessions.
So that's what we're going to go through.
If you haven't watched the first session, my name is Sean.
I'm the strategy lead here at Distinction and my job is facilitating all of ourdiscoveries, roadmaps and working with clients to ensure that they're gettingthe answers they need as well as we're creating sessions that are engaging and80% of leaders feel their company is good at crafting strategy.
But only 44% feel they are good at the implementation.
And I think this is probably where the major parts of a lot of strategies falldown is that people are good at sort of saying what we need to do.
But then when it actually gets to doing it, there's a lot of problems.

Sean - 02:15
And if we just go to the next slide.
You can see here, so I've broken this down by corporate, business andfunctional strategy.
The corporate strategy includes the vision, mission, values, And focus areas aswell as the overall strategy.
So turnaround is a fairly big one.
Stability and expansion.
Now expansion is probably the one we deal with the most companies wanting togrow, wanting to do better.
We've seen a lot of layoffs at the moment, particularly in the tech sector, andthey've probably gone from an expansion and they've gone back to a stabilitybased model where they're cutting back on workers to try and gain a bit ofcontrol in a So that gives you some ideas about that.

Sean - 02:59
The corporate strategy is usually set by the CEO in the C-suite and it maybe that a marketing CMO and other financial officer are involved but it's veryimportant that the corporate strategy is accurate because a lot of people don'toften question it after it's been created and we'll get on to that
in a moment.
So 67% of well-formulated strategies failed due to poor execution and this nextslide is one that you may be able to associate with as well.
But yeah 66% of well-formulated strategies.
Now it's an interesting stat that because it could be a case that thestrategies weren't well-formulated.
People just think they are and people don't question the strategy.
But it's also a clear indicator that the execution of strategy is difficult inbusinesses.

Sean - 03:57
And I've got some reasons why that might be, but here is an examplemarketing manager biting a pencil because she's frustrated.
And I've seen this happen in businesses where the corporate strategy is set.
Everyone in the C-suite is happy with it.
And then it's often handed off to a CMO or just a marketing manager or a headof marketing, whoever it may be.
And they're like, well, can you implement all of this and get all the results,please?
And then this person here has had that happen and they don't know where tostart.
They don't know if they have the skill set.

Sean - 04:30
They don't know if they have enough knowledge in X, Y, and Z. And this isan important one as well.
The corporate strategy by its nature is broad because it needs to cover thewhole business.
So that can be a challenge for marketers when they're probably taking onsomething that's more in the business area of the strategy.
So why do strategies fail?
Well, the first thing is vague strategic vision.
If the strategy isn't clear enough, it is going to be hard to act on that.
There can be a culture of fear.

Sean - 05:02
People can be scared of doing things wrong.
There could be a lack of planning and control.
So in terms of we've decided what we're going to do, but we haven't planned howwe're actually going to implement and make sure that we do it.
A lack of alignment and this can happen In small and large companies wherepeople aren't speaking to each other and people don't know what the other oneis doing and therefore they're not working in unity and harmony with each otherin terms of what they're doing towards the strategy.
They don't have the skill set.
Focusing on tactics too early is a very big one and I mentioned it in theprevious webinar But the problem with focusing on tactics too early is that youoften end up focusing on quick wins and all of this sort of stuff.
And the problem with that is that quick wins are quick, but they're also oftenshort lived.

Sean - 05:53
So if you're going to just focus on quick wins, you may run into problemswhere your strategy fails because it just isn't long enough.
You haven't done enough.
You've got to focus on some short term things and long term things to beeffective.
Finally there's no implementation plan.
So without an implementation plan it's just going to fall because no one knowswhat they're doing and when.
So ensuring success.
So how do we ensure success with strategies?

Sean - 06:26
So I showed you the first slide in the corporate strategy element and we'renow in the business strategy.
Now that slide I showed you with the lady buying her pencil in frustration.
She's Most likely in this area here, she might not be a CMO, she might not bebuilding the corporate strategy but she is responsible for the marketing andpossibly the digital as well.
In terms of what comes in the business strategy, this is where you've obviouslygot objectives for marketing KPIs but market research, how you find acompetitive advantage and the customers are key to this element of it.
And there are more elements in this bit but I mean these are ones as a businesswe focus on and it's possible that you're in these areas as well.
So setting the targets here is very important and our discovery sort of almostcomes in at this level and I'll go into a bit more detail about that later on.
So building the roadmap.

Sean - 07:27
That's a quick slide and we're now in the functional strategy.
So the functional strategy is essentially the tactics.
And as we've seen with those previous quotes, this seems to be the element thatpeople get wrong.
And I think part of it is a lack of knowledge and we've obviously been over theparts, but I think it's quite difficult to link the functional strategy to thebusiness strategy.
And I think it's harder still to link functional strategy to corporatestrategy.
They often feed into each other but I think that's where the main problem isand our discovery is essentially building out the functional strategy in termsof what are the actions we need to do to hit the business goals.
Where are the business goals?

Sean - 08:09
We want to increase revenue, we want to increase leads, we want to increaseconversions, those types of things.
The functional strategy helps hit and that's what we want to focus on in theroadmap.
So functional strategy, having a clear understanding of customers is key.
Having a focus on users and we use like design thinking methodology where theuser is at the heart of everything but it makes building functional tactics somuch easier because rather than focusing on oh we need to run this ad or weneed to do this or we need to have a TikTok account you're actually
looking well what problems are users having at the moment, how can we fix thoseproblems, what are the quickest ways we can fix those problems and what areSome better things we can do and then rank them.
So you're not just focusing on, oh, we need to do the quickest thing.
We need to just run PPC ads.

Sean - 09:03
You're really breaking it down much more effectively.
And all of those tactics formulate the roadmap, as I mentioned, which will hitthe goals and essentially solving problems is the order of the day here.
If you solve problems, you'll do better as a business.
The more problems you solve, The better you'll do.
It's as simple as that really.
So what's the approach?
Well, I shared this slide in the previous webinar that we did.

Sean - 09:37
And as you can see, whoops.
So in the previous webinar, we went through how you can run a workshop.
The discovery session that I did previously to this one covers this in a lotmore detail, but you can sort of see here.
How this session goes through the process of finding the problems, finding thesolutions and obviously you can do it in person with sticky notes and whateveras well.
So why would you run a workshop?
Well it allows all key stakeholders to be involved, focuses on problems and thesolutions, it breaks down big problems into more manageable fixable thingsthrough tactics and this is a key one.
The example I would give is that a lot of Companies come to us and say oh yeahour conversion rate isn't very good or we want more leads.

Sean - 10:27
Now to both of those questions there's probably 100 possible answers interms of what's causing those problems.
By running a workshop and having the discovery sprint as I spoke about in theprevious webinar we can really dig down into what are the main problems and bysolving them you'll solve The conversion problem, you'll solve the leadsproblem automatically, basically.
So breaking down big problems is a key thing there.
And as I mentioned a couple of times, our previous webinar covers it in moredetail.
So a demonstration.
So what I'm going to do here is share the roadmap for Sorry, for FinTechLimited.
It's not our roadmap, it's FinTech Limited.

Sean - 11:20
And if you look back or think back to the discovery webinar, you can seehow the two areas we were looking at were based on the website and themarketing.
And you can see how all of those items that have come up have been put into theroadmap.
If you do go back to that slide, you can sort of see these were the quick wins.
So the quick wins are right near the start in January, and then the morecomplex things are moving later on in the year.
And another interesting thing with this as well is that, for example, one ofthe issues in the discovery was an issue with the checkout.
And you can see that some of the checkout issues are over here in terms of thenew checkout system.
But we've also got some quick wins.

Sean - 12:09
So if the quick wins don't fix it, we know that we need to do more andwe've already got that planned in.
If those checkout updates fix all the problems, then obviously we can move morestuff in over here.
So it does really give you a lot of flexibility in terms of, so that's the newcheckout system there.
The other thing I'll mention here is that in each task, we've summarised whatneeds to be done.
And have an outcome, so have a plan to update checkout.
So the main thing from this plan would be, what can we get rid of in terms ofstages?
Where are the drop-offs?

Sean - 12:45
And this has already been looked at in the discovery sprint.
So there'll be a lot of information that they can draw back to and make thosedecisions.
This one is marked as to do because someone needs to do this task.
Obviously you can assign tasks, you can add tags and you can change the status.
So once it's done, it's done.
And this allows you to revisit the roadmap and just make sure that things arebeing done.
I think some of the time, I think when it comes back to the implementation ofstrategy is people are great at talking about doing things, but when itactually comes to the doing of things, that's where things probably fall down alittle bit.

Sean - 13:20
But having this here, making people accountable is the key.
And you can see we're split between website and marketing.
This is purely designed for Fintech Limited.
If you're a big company, you might just have a website one and that's managedby the head of engineering or a developer.
And the marketing one is managed just by marketing.
And then they work together collaboratively on the discovery to come up withthose solutions.
The whole point of the roadmap is it's flexible to your problems, your solutionsand your business.

Sean - 13:54
So this is just an example of how it could look.
The other thing I'll mention here, because this is how we sort of present it toour clients, but we mentioned their goals here.
So we're always on target with them and we revisit this with them every month.
They can come in here and add a note if there's something they want to discussor they're not happy with something or they are happy with something, which canalso happen as well.
So, yeah, that's sort of how we lay that out.
In terms of that, so you can see here everything that was That came up in thediscoveries in here now and it's in order of how we ranked it by priority.
So that's sort of how you build it.

Sean - 14:33
We've also got a backlog here and things can be added from here just intothe backlog if something needs to be done, but we're not quite sure where itcould go.
So yeah, there's potential for this to merge and change.
You can also notice as well that as things get later on in the year, things geta bit thinner.
Why you revisit the roadmap a few months before that, just to make sure thatit's always filled out and hopefully all of these things will be done by then.
If they're not, then it's a case of moving things along, but it's essentiallyjust to give accountability and make sure that people are doing what wasagreed.
So that's the roadmap example.
So back to the presentation.

Sean - 15:21
So a key importance is documenting the roadmap.
Roadmaps are only useful if they're documented and visited regularly, as Imentioned, and there is an ownership of tasks.
Another important thing, as I brought up before with the design thinking, isusers dictate tactics and don't just keep adding things onto the roadmap.
If you get into the point where the backlog is quite big, then it may be a caseyou may need more discovery or you need to rethink Like the roadmap sessionsthemselves.
So that's something to really think about.
Don't just keep adding, well, we've made a roadmap.
Let's just add everything in constantly.

Sean - 15:59
It's probably not going to work because the other element of it as well,you need to make sure that people are able to do the work and have time to dothe work.
So it's a little bit of management in terms of time as well.
We document our roadmaps in Miro, but other tools are available.
We're not sponsored or affiliated with them.
We just like the tool and a lot of our clients like it as well.
So the roadmap checklist.
So to ensure success with your roadmap, your tactics need to feed directly intoyour goals.

Sean - 16:29
They need to focus on users and fix problems affecting those users.
The roadmap tasks all have owners who are accountable and have deadlines fortheir completion.
You have scheduled timebox meeting every month to revisit the roadmap and askquestions and really make sure that things are on track.
If you still feel you lack the skills to implement a roadmap, you may need tolook into hiring internally or seeking external support like an agency to helpyou out with it.
So the recap, so we've provided a brief breakdown of strategy on the corporate,business and functional level.
We've also looked at some of the problems marketers specifically face whenimplementing strategy and why that can be difficult.
We've explained how workshops can define and solve those problems.

Sean - 17:24
We've also given the roadmap layout example and gone through that and howtasks can be labeled.
The thing I'll say with that, there's lots of tools like Trello and Forecastand stuff that do a similar job, so you can do it through there as well.
And finally, we've gone through the roadmap checklist to help ensure yourroadmap is successful.
So what are the next steps?
So you know How a digital roadmap will help you solve the business problemsidentified during discovery.
If you missed the discovery webinar, you'll be able to find a link on thislanding page and you should hopefully know how to create a roadmap that setsyou up for success.
And the other thing I hope is that in terms of how these link together, theidentifying of problems, coming up with solutions, ranking solutions andputting them into a roadmap is The best way to get the long term results.

Sean - 18:21
And that would be the main takeaway from me in terms of that.
But if you'd like any help running a digital roadmap session or a discoverysession, then drop us a line.
Our email is hello.distinction.co.uk as you can see on the slide.
I'd like to thank you for sticking out until the end and thank you for yourtime.
And hopefully I'll speak to you again soon.
And best of luck with your roadmaps and discoveries.
Take care, bye.