What is an Outcome-Based Roadmap?
An outcome-based roadmaps are strategic planning tools used by product teams to define, visualize, and communicate the desired business outcomes they want their product or service to drive. Unlike traditional product roadmaps which focus on features and releases, an outcome-based roadmap focuses on the customer and business goals that features are intended to achieve.
Some key characteristics of outcome-based roadmaps:
- They focus on outcomes, not outputs. Outcomes are the impact your product has rather than just the features you ship.
- They align to clear business objectives and key results (OKRs). There is a direct line of sight from roadmap initiatives to core company goals.
- They focus on the “why” behind what you’re building more than the “what.” Outcomes explain why a feature matters.
- They require cross-functional collaboration between product, engineering, design, and business teams. Outcomes span disciplines.
- They connect the dots between teams by showcasing dependencies. Achieving outcome A might require work from teams B and C.
The main benefit of this approach is shifting teams from a features mindset to an outcomes mindset. Features tell you what to build, outcomes explain why it matters. This helps teams build solutions focused on maximum impact and business alignment.
When Should You Use Outcome-Based Roadmaps?
Outcome-based roadmaps are well-suited for:
- Companies focused on innovation and disruption over inventory management. Outcome-driven cultures embrace innovation.
- Customer-centric organizations looking to deeply understand target users and jobs-to-be-done. You can’t improve lives without knowing customers.
- Businesses wanting increased transparency and alignment across teams to hit goals. Breaking down cross-functional dependencies is key.
- Teams practicing objectives and key results (OKRs) needing ways to connect OKRs to planned work. Roadmaps provide the missing link between goals and execution.
- Products struggling with prioritization and staying focused. Outcomes help identify and double down on what matters most.
If your team deals with shifting priorities, unclear goals from leadership, or problems building the right things, an outcome-based roadmap can help align perspectives.
How to Get Started
Building effective outcome-based roadmaps takes work. Expect the first few iterations to be a heavy lift. Like any skill, it takes practice – but done right, the payoff is immense.
Here is a step-by-step process to help you get started:
1. Define Your Vision
Start by revisiting your company and product vision and ensuring there is executive alignment. The product vision is your north star guiding big bets – it grounds your roadmap. Clearly understand target customers, their underserved outcomes, and how you uniquely help them.
Run vision exercises with your team and leadership until you have strong agreement. Documents things so you have an anchor as plans evolve.
2. Connect Vision to Strategy
Next, translate your vision into a product and company strategy document covering the next 3+ years. Detail what outcomes you want to make progress towards each year, linking back to your vision. Think big picture.
Involve company leaders early and often here to ensure buy-in. Having their perspectives built into the strategy makes future roadmap prioritization easier.
3. Break Down Goals into Outcomes
Now decompose your strategy into strategic goals for the next 12-18 months. These goals ladder up into multi-year strategic priorities.
For each goal, define what outcome success looks like using objective metrics like increased revenue or market share, lower churn or costs, higher NPS or engagement rates, etc.
Get concrete with target outcome numbers based on your business model, industry benchmarks, and historic performance.
4. Draft Initial Roadmap
Next, brainstorm initiatives at a high level which could help achieve each goal. Initiatives are groups of ideas/projects centered around driving specific outcomes. This will be a messy ideation process, so bring together people across functions to determine what to test.
Draft an initial roadmap view showing goal timeframes and initiatives believed to impact them. This will visualize interdependencies between business objectives and the efforts required to hit them. You’ll refine things later.
5. Identify Key Results
For each initiative, describe what success looks like using one or more objective key results (OKRs). An OKR is a concrete, measurable output that marks progress towards a goal, like “Increase new signups from 100/week to 500/week”.
OKRs force clarity on how initiatives actually move outcomes and business results. They create a sharp, shared focus for execution teams and help monitor real-world impact vs. just output delivery.
6. Prioritize a Roadmap Portfolio
With goals, metrics, and draft initiatives mapped out, work with stakeholders to assess investment levels and prioritization. The goal is creating a balanced portfolio across growth, optimization, innovation, capabilities, etc. based on what outcomes matter most right now.
Use data, not opinions, to decide. Quantitatively estimate initiative impact on key results as input to priority. There are no right answers at first, just hypotheses to test.
7. Connect Teams and Plans
Share your outcome-based roadmap early and often to align teams around upcoming objectives and priorities. The roadmap is a plan coming together – not a done deal.
Ensure groups understand the why behind initiatives, how they connect, the outcomes driving priorities, and their role delivering results. Iterate on the roadmap together as new learnings and constraints emerge.
8. Track Progress Visibly
As initiatives kick off, establish rhythm tracking and discussing outcome key results and roadmap progress during regular reviews. Because the roadmap guided investment prioritization based on expected impact, you need to confirm those hypotheses in real market conditions.
Don’t let the roadmap stale. If data shows some initiatives clearly moving the needle more than others, have the courage to adapt plans based on real outcome evidence vs. gut feel. Outcomes help you learn.
9. Improve Processes Over Time
Like any product you build, continuously improve your outcome-based roadmapping practice. Retrospect what works and what doesn’t during planning cycles. Refine processes, documentation, team workflows, templates, and communication cadences.
Automate pieces where you can. Outcome roadmaps involve a lot of connecting dots – look to tools to help visualize and share evolving plans and results.
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Wrapping Up
Shifting to outcome-based product roadmaps takes time but pays dividends over the long term. Much like moving to OKRs or jobs-to-be-done, embracing an outcome mindset forces teams to align priorities to what actually will move revenue, customers, and markets in a measurable way.
Not only will the solutions you build improve by truly understanding target outcomes, but business leaders will have increased confidence investing in a product process anchored in improving real-world metrics vs. outputs.
If misalignment between leadership and product is causing friction, or you feel teams don’t have complete perspective on why initiatives matter, give outcome-based roadmaps a try.
