About Strategic Roadmap
Defines what products and services would a company develop with timeline to capture the market share. Set of tools progressively add rigor to the roadmap through Benchmarking, Portfolio balancing, Project prioritization, Competitive intelligence, Smart forecasting, and Scenario based planning. This is like the GPS for your car that guides you through the fastest route to your destination.
Creating a Strategic Roadmap
First you need to establish a basic framework to capture data and communicate the roadmap to the organization. There are many ways to do so and many formats are available online. Whatever format you may choose, fundamentally, you need to create a timeline of projects/products/services lifecycle. A level above, you should address the market/customer need being addressed. And at levels below, you should successively line up technology, expertise (talent, knowledge, assets), resources/partnerships that support the product life cycle. The time frame needs to be reasonable, and practical. All projects should address internal and external needs, gaps, and opportunities. These can be identified by collecting and processing data from various sources.
- Emerging companies are generally Top Down corporate driven, and the boss does competitive benchmarking
- Established companies would normally do a thorough competitive intelligence, technology scouting, and listen to workforce
- Mature companies look beyond the horizon (customers/markets today) and do smart forecasting to develop an evolutionary strategy
- Robust companies actually make a conscious effort to both disrupt the market space, and do scenario based planning to prevail, in case a new entrant disrupts their business