Outcome-based roadmaps are becoming the preferred approach for many product teams looking to align their product strategy and ensure they are building value, not just features.
By focusing on the desired results, outcomes provide context around why items are prioritized on the roadmap. This prevents teams from turning into feature factories shipping arbitrary things.
In this post, we’ll explore what outcome-based roadmaps are, how they differ from other types of roadmaps, when you should use them, and how to create effective outcome-focused roadmaps.
You’ll learn what makes them valuable, their benefits and drawbacks, and how to put together visual outcome roadmaps that clearly communicate goals. With a solid understanding of outcome-driven roadmapping, you can determine if this approach is right for your team and product strategy.
What is an Outcome Based Roadmap?
An outcome-based roadmap is a strategic planning document that focuses on the results you want to achieve, rather than just listing features. It aligns product development efforts with your overarching business objectives and desired goals.
Unlike traditional feature-based roadmaps that simply showcase new features and functionality, an outcome roadmap starts by defining specific, measurable outcomes you’re aiming for. These outcomes are tied to your product vision and strategy.
The roadmap then outlines the necessary initiatives, features, and milestones required to accomplish those outcomes, with resources and timelines mapped to the roadmap to ensure accountability.
Some key elements of outcome-based roadmaps include:
- Clear outcomes linked to product vision and strategy
- Timeframes and target dates for key milestones
- Features and activities chosen based on impact on outcomes
- Resource allocation to support roadmap execution
- Measurement of progress toward desired outcomes
By starting with the outcomes and working backward, outcome-based roadmaps keep teams focused on delivering meaningful value, not just features.
They provide flexibility while maintaining alignment between activities and overarching business goals.
How to Make an Outcome-based Roadmap
Creating an effective outcome-based roadmap takes careful planning and alignment across your product team. Follow these key steps:
1. Define Your Product Vision and Strategy
Before building your roadmap, your team needs a clear understanding of the product vision and overarching strategy.
Identify your target customers, market position, and long-term objectives. This provides crucial context for the outcomes you will define next.
2. Determine Your Desired Outcomes
With your vision in mind, discuss and decide on 4-5 measurable outcomes you want to achieve. These will form the backbone of your roadmap.
Outcomes should tie to your product strategy and can include targets like reducing churn by 10%, increasing conversion rates, or expanding your customer base into new segments. Make sure they are specific and quantifiable.
3. Collect Feedback and Feature Requests
Set up processes to gather ongoing customer feedback and feature requests from channels like in-app surveys, support tickets, user interviews, etc.
This input is invaluable for identifying potential features that can help drive your defined outcomes. Then centralize this data to inform road mapping.
4. Identify Outcome-driving Features
Review the feedback and feature requests to determine what functionality would have the greatest impact on achieving your outcomes.
Avoid adding arbitrary new features just for the sake of expansion and stay focused on features tied to your goals.
5. Prioritize Features
With your shortlist of high-potential features, decide what order to tackle them in. Consider factors like effort, timeliness, and customer demand. Prioritize features that align closely with outcomes and provide the most value.
6. Map Timelines and Resources
Slot your prioritized features into appropriate timeframes based on resourcing, milestones, and interdependencies. Identify all the resources like budget, staffing, and technology needed for implementation.
7. Design and Visualize
Determine the best layout and visual style for your roadmap that clearly conveys your outcomes, timelines, and features. Consider swimlanes, a calendar view, or a simplistic next/near/far style.
8. Gather Feedback
Before finalizing your roadmap, solicit feedback from key internal stakeholders. Incorporate their input into your plan, making edits as needed.
9. Share and execute
Publish the roadmap so your entire product team has visibility. Work closely with development teams to ensure timely, outcome-focused execution. Revisit and adjust regularly based on learnings and new data.
Pros of Outcome Based Roadmaps
Adopting an outcome-based approach to your product roadmap offers several key advantages:
1. Promotes Alignment
With a clear focus on desired outcomes, teams stay aligned on the bigger goals rather than getting lost in feature development. Outcome roadmaps provide crucial context on why specific features are included and prioritized.
2. Encourages Flexibility
Outcomes drive roadmap prioritization but leave room for teams to determine the best solutions. This flexibility enables pivoting as needed based on new data or market changes.
3. Focuses on Customer Value
Outcomes keep the end-user experience and deliver value at the forefront. Features aren’t added just for expansion but for driving results.
4. Enables Data-driven Decisions
Quantifiable outcomes and progress tracking promote data-informed decisions vs gut instinct, as you can clearly see what’s moving the needle on goals.
5. Improves Communication
With outcomes highlighted, stakeholders understand what you aim to accomplish and why. Outcome roadmaps tell a compelling story.
6. Supports Agility
Outcome focus provides a strategic direction without overly prescribed plans, blending well with Agile frameworks, such that teams can respond quickly to feedback.
7. Prevents feature bloat
Tying features directly to outcomes discourages adding superfluous capabilities that deliver little value such that the roadmap stays lean.
The flexibility, alignment, and customer-centric nature of outcome roadmaps make them well-suited for today’s dynamic environments. While transitioning takes work, the long-term benefits are substantial.
Cons of Outcome-Based Roadmaps
While outcome-based roadmapping has many upsides, there are also some potential drawbacks to consider. These include:
1. Can Lack Specifics
With no prescribed features listed, some stakeholders may want more specifics on planned functionality. It is critical to balance the outcome focus with enough feature details.
2. More Initial Work
Defining strategic outcomes and tying features to them takes concerted upfront effort, hence it is easy to default to just listing features.
3. Ongoing Refinement
You must continually re-evaluate features and realign with current outcomes as outcome roadmaps require active management.
4. Less Predictable
Without set features locked in far in advance, some uncertainty exists. Timelines and deliverables can shift more fluidly.
5. Requires Buy-in
Getting agreement on outcomes from stakeholders may take some work as it needs full team commitment for success.
6. Can Reduce Urgency
Having flexible features tied to outcomes risks losing a sense of urgency if timeframes keep shifting.
7. Measurement Challenges
Quantifying business impact and tying it back to specific features can be difficult as models and metrics require scrutiny.
8. Less Visual Appeal
Creative design is needed as visualizing outcomes elegantly while still detailing features can be tricky.
While these drawbacks deserve consideration, none are inherently deal-breakers as the potential downsides can be overcome with sufficient planning and mitigation.
When to Use Outcome Based Roadmaps
Outcome-based roadmaps are extremely useful in certain contexts but may not be the best fit universally. Consider applying outcome roadmapping in these scenarios:
- Early Stage Products: For new products still validating their model, flexible outcome roadmaps allow adjusting to find product-market fit without extensive rework. Outcomes provide direction without rigorous feature specifications.
- Mission-Driven Products: If your product vision is tied to a larger social mission or ethical objectives, outcome roadmaps keep those goals upfront versus a feature factory approach.
- Enterprise Software: For B2B products, business outcomes like increased efficiency or cost reduction may be more salient than specific features as Enterprise IT buyers respond better to outcomes.
- Customer-Centric Businesses: In customer-obsessed cultures focused on delighting users, outcome roadmaps centered on satisfaction and retention make perfect sense.
- Regulated Industries: In regulated sectors like healthcare or finance, products often enable compliance as a primary goal. Outcome roadmaps accommodate evolving regulatory needs.
- Dynamic/Volatile Markets: When markets move rapidly, long-term feature roadmaps become outdated quickly. Outcome roadmaps readily adapt to fluctuating landscapes.
- Transformational Initiatives: For turnarounds or strategic pivots, outcome-based planning allows breaking with the status quo versus incremental feature changes.
- Lofty Corporate Goals: Audacious business outcomes like doubling revenue or cutting operational costs may necessitate flexibility beyond predefined feature sets.
For more mature products in steady domains, feature-based roadmaps may still prove effective. However, in the scenarios above, embracing outcome-driven roadmapping can provide real strategic advantages.
Outcome Based Roadmap Best Practices
Creating and managing effective outcome-based product roadmaps requires diligence and disciplined execution. Follow these key best practices:
1. Laser Focus on Outcomes
At every stage of the roadmapping process, keep your defined outcomes front and center.
Whether determining timeline priorities, selecting features, or allocating resources, always orient your decisions around how to best achieve your measurable end goals.
2. Leverage Data and Research
Don’t define outcomes and associated features based on hunches or internal opinions.
Back up your roadmap elements with hard data points, user research insights, and market analysis wherever possible as validating assumptions with research will produce more accurate plans.
3. Prioritize Ruthlessly
Be extremely selective about what functionality gets added to your outcome-driven roadmap.
Include only those feature ideas firmly tied to advancing one or more of your quantifiable outcomes, and say no to anything that doesn’t have a clear return in driving your results, no matter how exciting the capability might seem in isolation.
4. Plan with Agility
Avoid long-term feature locking by using rolling wave planning or quarterly planning cycles.
Leave room within your roadmap to pivot based on new learnings and feedback, and balance this flexibility with clear accountability mechanisms so progress doesn’t stall.
5. Think Cross-functionally
Don’t create plans in a silo. Actively seek input and gain buy-in from stakeholders across business, technology, design, customer support, and other functions when defining outcomes and populating your roadmap.
6. Design for Comprehension
Prominently showcase the outcome layer of your roadmap upfront. Make the connection to enabling features, milestones, and timing easy to comprehend at a glance, even for audiences less familiar with product processes.
7. Get Frequent Feedback
Frequently run planned outcomes and associated features by both internal and external stakeholders. Watch for signs of misalignment and proactively incorporate feedback into roadmap revisions.
8. Review and Refine Regularly
Don’t “set and forget” your outcome roadmap after finalizing it. Establish regular checkpoints to revisit your outcome priorities and readjust features based on the latest insights on market needs, technical capabilities, and business environment.
9. Measure Progress Meticulously
Put mechanisms in place to closely track progress against your defined outcome metrics.
Analyze the data to determine if you’re hitting your outcome targets. If not, be ready to quickly adjust your roadmap initiatives and reallocate resources to get back on track.
Outcome Based Roadmap Examples
Some real-world examples of outcome-focused product roadmaps include:
1. Customer Retention Roadmap
This roadmap has a single strategic objective of improving customer retention and reducing churn. Specific measurable outcomes include decreasing the churn rate by 15% and improving renewal rates by 10% over the next two quarters.
Enabling features like in-app surveys, usage tracking, and pricing optimization tie directly to driving those renewal and churn outcomes.
2. Account Growth Roadmap
Focused on expanding existing accounts, this roadmap defines specific account growth and upsell revenue outcomes.
The timeline shows how features like account management portals, new pricing tiers, and reporting dashboards aim to enable those goals. Progress metrics are defined for each major milestone.
3. Onboarding Improvement Roadmap
With a goal of optimizing the new user onboarding flow, this roadmap outlines target outcomes for activation rates, onboarding completion percentages, and trial-to-paid conversion.
Features focus squarely on easing user adoption like in-app walkthroughs, enhanced tutorials, and self-guided product tours.
4. Engineering Efficiency Roadmap
For an engineering team, the outcomes highlight reducing release cycles and technical debt, and improving velocity. Feature efforts center around test automation, improving CI/CD pipelines, and modular architecture.
Progress measures look at deployment frequency, open bugs, and release throughput.
5. eCommerce Marketing Outcomes Roadmap
This roadmap focuses on marketing outcomes like increased organic traffic, higher search conversions, and bigger average order value.
Proposed initiatives encompass SEO optimization, refreshed website copy, exit intent offers, and personalized on-site experiences.
These examples illustrate how effective outcome roadmaps outline specific measurable results, along with the features required to drive those outcomes. They align product development tightly with strategic goals.
Outcome Based Roadmaps vs Feature Based Roadmaps
Outcome-based and feature-based roadmaps reflect fundamentally different approaches to product planning and prioritization. Their core distinctions include:
1. Divergent Focus
Outcome roadmaps put the emphasis first on identifying strategic goals and desired results, considering features secondary.
In contrast, feature roadmaps focus squarely on defining capabilities and enhancements to build, with outcomes assumed or implied.
2. Differing Purpose
Outcome roadmaps aim to tightly align product development efforts and initiatives with broader business objectives and KPIs. The purpose is to plan products that move the needle on organizational goals.
Feature roadmaps concentrate on identifying, sequencing, and scheduling the delivery of incremental product capabilities based on resourcing realities and technical dependencies.
3. Flexibility vs Specificity
Outcome roadmaps maintain flexibility on how the goals will specifically be achieved, allowing room for pivoting as needed.
Feature roadmaps on the other hand lock in and commit to delivering on predefined functionality specifications, limiting room for adjusting course.
4. Varying Time Horizons
Outcome roadmaps naturally focus further into the future, outlining longer-term strategic aims, while feature roadmaps tend to concentrate more on near-term capability enhancements slated for delivery within the next 1-2 quarters.
5. Success Measurement
For outcome roadmaps, progress and success are measured through KPIs tied to the stated objectives like revenue growth, customer retention, market expansion, etc.
Feature roadmaps track progress quantitatively based on completion rates – the number of outlined features shipped.
The two approaches clearly offer complementary benefits. Blending outcome thinking for strategy with feature specifications for tactical execution provides a balanced product planning paradigm.
However, understanding their contrasts allows emphasizing outcome focus where it brings the most value.
Outcome Based Roadmaps vs Goal Based Roadmaps
While outcome-based and goal-based roadmaps are similar in their high-level focus on driving results, they differ in some key ways:
1. Level of Specificity
Outcome roadmaps define broader, high-level strategic results the organization wants to achieve through its product efforts.
In contrast, goal roadmaps break these desired outcomes down into very specific, measurable, time-bound goals and sub-goals.
2. Core Purpose
Both approaches aim to tightly connect product initiatives and priorities to overarching business objectives.
However, the main emphasis for outcome roadmaps is ensuring this alignment to company strategy, while goal roadmaps focus more on meticulously sequencing short-term tasks to hit targets.
3. Time Horizon
Outcome roadmaps are typically longer-term, focused on larger 3+ year vision. Goal roadmaps operate on much shorter timeframes, diligently mapping out granular activities quarter-by-quarter to accomplish objectives.
4. Flexibility vs Rigidity
Outcome roadmaps maintain flexibility in how the results will specifically be achieved, allowing room for pivoting as circumstances change.
On the other hand, goal roadmaps prescribe detailed requirements down to the task level, limiting room for course adjusting.
5. Visual Presentation
While outcomes are visualized and presented at a higher, consolidated level, with goals and sub-goals falling underneath, goal roadmaps display a more complex hierarchy of granular goals, objectives, and tasks across multiple levels.
The two frameworks bring unique benefits that are complementary rather than mutually exclusive. Blending outcome focus for strategy with goal specificity for execution is an effective roadmapping paradigm widely employed.
Outcome Based Roadmaps vs Value Based Roadmaps
While outcome-based and value-based roadmaps share a common philosophy of driving tangible results, they differ in their specific approach:
1. Divergent Prioritization Focus
Outcome roadmaps prioritize based on which initiatives and features will best accomplish the defined strategic business objectives. The emphasis is on outcomes.
Value roadmaps rank features according to quantifiable value delivered to users, concentrating on the customer perspective.
2. Differing Core Purpose
While both frameworks ultimately target business success, the purpose of outcome roadmaps is aligning development work to overarching company goals to drive growth and profitability.
Conversely, value roadmaps aim to optimize the efficient delivery of maximum value to users with available resources.
3. Flexibility vs Prescriptiveness
Outcome roadmaps maintain flexibility on the solutions for achieving the outcomes, while value roadmaps prescribe clear specifications for required value-driving features.
4. Time Horizon Differences
Outcome roadmaps use longer timeframes fitting strategic planning cycles to map the destination, while value roadmaps operate on shorter timeframes of a quarter or less to roadmap each step.
5. Measurement and Tracking
Outcome roadmaps progress via tracking business KPIs like revenue, customer retention, operational efficiency, etc, while value roadmaps rely on quantifying cumulative value delivered through each completed feature.
The two approaches bring unique strengths that likely work best in combination. Value assessment shaping tactical decisions within outcome-aligned strategic direction.
Final Thoughts on Outcome-Based Roadmaps
Outcome-based roadmaps provide a powerful way for product teams to directly connect their initiatives to core business goals.
By outlining the results you want to achieve first, outcome roadmaps ensure your product strategy stays aligned to the objectives that matter most. Features then become enablers of your overarching vision.
With their customer-centric philosophy, flexibility, and focus on driving real impact, outcome roadmaps help create products that deliver meaningful value, not just incremental features.
For many modern product organizations, embracing outcome-driven planning is key to building solutions optimized for evolving business needs.
