Overview

Let's begin our thematic roadmapping journey by creating a powerful vision statement that will lay the foundation for your long-term goals. A vision is the compass that remains steadfast amidst changing priorities, industry trends, and economic conditions. By grounding your work in an unchanging vision, your teams will find long-term success and inspiration. In the vision statement workshop, we'll gather perspectives from all relevant teams, ensuring comprehensive input. We'll start by defining your offering, whether it's a concrete solution or an abstract concept. Then, we'll identify your target customers, drawing upon existing resources such as analytics and user research. Next, we'll outline the problems and needs you aim to solve for your customers, leveraging insights from analytics and customer feedback. Finally, we'll uncover your "Secret Sauce" – what sets your organization apart from competitors and makes you the preferred choice for customers. With these inputs in hand, we'll begin drafting the vision statement, using inspiration from industry leaders if needed. You'll have the opportunity to refine and vote on the most resonant statements, eventually arriving at a finalized version. Congratulations on creating a clear and compelling vision statement that will guide your roadmap towards success!

How long should I plan for? 60-90 minutes workshop (you will likely have some shorter follow-up sessions if you plan to synch up with your copywriter or conduct any research before finalizing vision statement)

Who should be invited? Identify the key stakeholders from the kickoff meeting to ensure you have proper representation from each team. If there is anyone new that is joining, be sure to provide them with another quick overview of what the team is trying to accomplish with the thematic roadmap.

Is there any prep work? Yes, try to gather any prior research and insights on user personas, top pain points for customers, and any previous work on a company vision or mission statement. Go over any research with the team to help them define the service/product offering, target customers, problems/needs, and secret sauce.

Overview:

Gear up for another amazing workshop on settings Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)! OKRs are the driving force behind turning your visionary aspirations into tangible achievements. In this workshop, we'll dive deep into the art of setting qualitative goals that are firmly rooted in your long-term vision. By defining your objectives, you'll pave the way for focused action and strategic alignment. But we won't stop there! Next we'll identify the key metrics that will serve as measurable milestones on your path to success. These specific and quantifiable goals will provide clear indicators of progress, keeping your team motivated and driven. With your vision, objectives, and key results in place, you'll have built a solid foundation for a successful long-term strategy and roadmap for your organization. Get ready to elevate your goal-setting game and unlock the true potential of OKRs in this next lesson on thematic roadmapping!

How long should I plan for? This workshop may take 60-90 minutes.

Who should be invited? At least one representative from each team outlined in the kickoff workshop.

Is there any prep work? By this point, you should have already gathered some foundational research to help aid the vision statement workshop. You can surface that research again and provide a quick overview to help remind the stakeholders of the current business and customer experience.

Any homework? Synch up with leadership to help inform the degree to which you want to influence the key results (i.e. Increase add to carts by X%; they can help you determine how much the organization needs to try to increase these numbers by).

Overview:

Now that you have built a strong foundation with your long-term vision and OKRs, it's time to embark on the exciting journey of shaping themes that will drive you closer to your goals. This step requires thorough preparation and research. Before coming together as a team, you'll dive into gathering and documenting valuable insights from a variety of sources, such as UX research, customer analytics, stakeholder interviews, and brainstorming sessions. Armed with these rich artifacts, you will convene with your team to embark on an affinity mapping adventure, organizing the inputs into coherent themes. Each theme will receive a distinct and evocative name that encapsulates its essence. With key stakeholders in the mix, you'll collaboratively craft problem or need statements, identify the beneficiaries of the work, determine the key business metrics to be addressed, pinpoint the product areas and teams impacted, and assign dedicated leaders. The beauty of well-defined themes lies in their ability to provide a comprehensive understanding of the team's exploration and how it aligns with the organization's long-term goals and visions. Get ready to unlock the power of themes as you take a big step forward on your thematic roadmapping journey!

How long should I plan for? 60-90 minutes to run this workshop

Who should be invited? At least one representative from each team as identified from kickoff meeting

Is there any prep work? Yes, this one requires the most prep work. You will need to go back through all current research and analytics to identify the painpoints, needs, and opportunities. You may also benefit from stakeholder interviews with leadership to gather their perspective on additional business ideas and opportunities for the organization that should be considered. Document all of these as "inputs" in the board prior to planning.

Any homework? If you ran out of time during the workshop and wanted to finish defining the themes on your own based upon the data/information already gathered from the team, go for it! Sometimes I do this to help get things moving along faster and then I take a few minutes to review the defined themes with the team to ensure it all sounds good and aligns with them.

Overview:

Get ready for a comprehensive workshop on roadmap prioritization! In this final step, you will learn how to identify and define key criteria that will drive the ranking of your themes of work. Factors such as business value, user value, impact, effort, resources, and cost will be considered and evaluated. Through collaborative discussions with key stakeholders representing different teams, you will assess each theme against the established criteria to determine their relative priority. By aggregating the ratings and, if necessary, applying weighting factors, you will achieve a clear understanding of the prioritization of your themes. Additionally, we will explore the application of the Now, Next, Future Framework to allocate themes based on their importance and timelines. At the end of this workshop, you will have developed a meticulously prioritized thematic roadmap, informed by research and aligned across teams. This will equip you with a strategic roadmap that will guide your organization towards achieving its goals. Best of luck as you embark on your roadmapping journey!

How long should I plan for? 60-90 minutes depending on how many themes you have.

Who should be invited? At least one representative from each team and also ensure that you have someone there who is confident enough to give an estimated score for each prioritization criteria (typically a PM can represent the business, Dev Architect can represent effort/resources, and UX can represent the customer).

Is there any prep work? Not this time! Just ensure all the themes are thoroughly defined before proceeding.

Any homework? Share out your finalized roadmap and celebrate! You've completed an important tool and everyone across the organization should be made aware of it to help enlighten everyone on the company's long term vision and strategy!

How to deal with new requests and re-prioritizing work. We'll also cover how the roadmap can help prevent teams from having to pivot and/or at least understanding why teams are pivoting.

This video helps teams understand what to do after they create their thematic roadmap, how to kickoff discovery work, and move projects forward successfully.