Battle Scars: A Roadmap is Not a Strategy or a Plan

A common mistake in business is to confuse a roadmap with a strategy or a plan. While a roadmap outlines a high-level vision of where a company wants to go and how it plans to get there, it does not provide the detailed steps necessary to achieve that vision.

A strategy, on the other hand, is a long-term plan that outlines how a company will achieve its goals, and a plan is a specific set of actions that need to be taken to implement that strategy. Understanding the differences between these three is critical for success and the story below illustrates what can happen if it isn’t there.

A Cautionary Tale

We had a senior executive that was vying to be next in line as CEO. In order to do that they were going to need to undermine and surpass another executive already in the c-suite by developing and releasing a product that was going “revolutionize the industry”. 

What was this miraculous product? A data driven interface for product to be ordered, manufactured, and distributed based on historical trends of product movement. The promise was going to be exponential increase in revenue, reduction of unsold inventory, and huge sellouts because the process was going to be so tailored to consumer needs, that there was no way it could fail. It was going to replace an existing ordering system that would reduce or eliminate human error (manual orders from buyers). 

The idea was actually a really good one and made a lot of strategic sense if it had been able to be pulled off. This is where the idea that a roadmap of promises is not a strategy or a plan. 

The senior executive delegated to one of their direct reporting junior executives to create the product strategy and drive the execution. The roadmap created was chock full of promised release dates and revenue targets. There was no hypothesis or room for adjustment. There was, however, tens of millions of dollars in budget and three separate organizational silos formed to build it: one for product management, one for data science, and one faction of IT carved out specifically for the technology. 

Fast forward a year into the initiative. IT had gone off on their own to build a platform that would service the entire enterprise in its AI and machine learning capabilities (it was not a small, case driven feat) while the product and data science organization had gone off to develop models that didn’t necessarily prove their use cases. It was more or less mining for information that supported an already established way of thinking. 

As deadlines and results continued to be missed, leaders put more and more pressure on managers and teams. Blame shifting between department heads was rampant, yet there was no accountability or consensus on the vision. Everyone did what they thought best in their own pocket. 

The product group eventually developed a prototype of software without IT’s input, so there was no way to vet the sustainability of operating such a large and complex system after it went live. 

As the promised deadlines and revenue targets were looming, the pressure heightened to make everything work. On the surface, the interface technically worked, but behind the scenes everything was held together with hamster wheels and duct tape. Manual refreshes of vast amounts of data were required every time there was a whim. Data was being manipulated to fit a narrative, rather than used as a tool to discover and then adjust. 

Mostly no one had ever questioned that perhaps the assumptions made were wrong. Those that did question were quickly put aside and moved to different areas. Was it really necessary to build a completely new interface? Could the machine learning outputs been used with the existing ordering system? It wasn’t really clear what outcomes were truly trying to be achieved. 

After two years and $30 million dollars had been sunk into the effort, a revolving door of personnel (including several leaders), the system finally went live with a handful of internal users, all of which who were pretty pained at doing double duty of using their current system with the new system as a pilot.

How soon would it be known if the juice was worth the squeeze? After all of this investment and turmoil, there would be no indicator of contribution of value for about 15 months. That didn’t stop both executives from publicly touting how their efforts had led to millions in increased revenue, despite the fact that this system had not been used in any way to influence operations at the time. 

So what was the end result? Most executives involved in the initiative were exited from the business, some ceremoniously, others not so much. The one junior executive that remained got denied further approval for funding, but skirted the financial controls by breaking the budget into separate initiatives. The initiative continued to be a revolving door of leaders and participants long after with no return on investment. 

Was There a Better Way?

So could this initiative been a success? My heart felt opinion is absolutely, it could have been! The reason I say that with confidence is because there were similar initiatives going on within the portfolio at the same time that were extremely successful, but the leadership approach was far different. 

The leaders of the initiatives that were successful had these things in common:

• Instead of promising arbitrary dates and targets for huge organizational budgets, they started with a series of small, simple hypotheses. 

• They leveraged what they already had from a talent, technology, and system standpoint, only building what they needed to move their initiative forward. 

• They provided the vision, direction, and prioritization needed to keep moving forward, but they got out of the execution teams’ way.

• The teams were small and arranged for flow in a way that didn’t inhibit their ability to innovate when needed.

• If something didn’t pan out, this was accepted as fact and there was either a pivot or a revision of the hypothesis/assumptions. 

• No throwing good money after bad to save face. Admitting mistakes or “failure” was a path to improving. 

• Once a small thing was proven to create value, it was mined and expanded upon for more value. 

Most of these initiatives had a 3 to 1 ROI in the beginning and continued to grow long after they were implemented. A stark contrast to the cautionary tale we started with.

Roadmaps are general markers of where we want to be. They have to be flexible especially as circumstances will change over time. The more we learn, the more we can adapt. 

I’m sure many folks can relate to this story, even if not at such financial extremes. While it highlights challenges that can arise with leadership and culture, it can be a great reminder for us to trust our instincts when we’re leading initiatives. We are not alone in our experiences.