Infographic by Dennis Michael Dimos

A value roadmap can provide a number of sustainable benefits inside the company that invests in the effort.

1. The capabilities section of the value roadmap showcases the gaps between what the roadmap says is needed and what the company can actually provide. The gap analysis showcases exactly where the company needs to improve its own capabilities in terms of people, process, solutions, and services.
2. The gap analysis becomes a decision tree for what, when and how a company needs to fill the gaps. It sets up decisions that need to be made regarding
   1. Priorities
   2. Timing
   3. Investments
   4. Methodology – build, buy or partner
3. The effort to develop the value roadmap can motivate a company. Let’s face it. The work is highly strategic. It’s about creating an innovative yet functional form of intellectual property that can help catapult the company to category leadership. It represents a significant value opportunity, and everyone involved knows it.
4. The roadmap team is a reflection of how powerful a company can be when it aligns its critical assets. The construction of a value roadmap requires the active participation of a cross-functional team from Product Management, Sales, Services, and Marketing. Input in = input out. Smart, committed people supported by executive sponsors will produce a really good result.
5. The roadmap identifies what each department needs to do
   1. Product Management needs to fill gaps in the product portfolio while continually improving existing products that are core to what’s needed
   2. Services can elevate its game from simply supporting customers to strategically guiding customers through a new consulting practice
   3. Marketing must leverage the thought leadership value of the roadmap, first with influencers like analysts and the media, then as a vehicle to drive higher value engagements with customers and prospects
   4. Sales needs to be trained on how to leverage the roadmap content in two ways: to create a new narrative with current customers; and to be able to have a credible conversation with senior executives who heretofore have eluded the company’s reach
6. The content of the roadmap can be repurposed into other thought leadership forms, such as keynote addresses, Point-of-View booklets, executive seminars, workshops, articles, and the like. For one company, we even formed a partnership with a top business school to create an executive education series off of the content of the roadmap. We received money (nice), valuable input (good), access to executives (really good), and the pedigree of partnering with a leading institution (invaluable).

As you have seen in these posts, a value roadmap is a highly worthy endeavor for those companies looking to lead a changing or emerging category. It has clear and sustainable benefits within the marketplace and within the company doing it.

But, it’s not easy. Not in the least. To be successful you have to be willing to commit to the hard work of doing it properly. Here are some tips.

– You have to stay firm with a skeptical sales force used to selling from demos

– You have to test the content of the roadmap as it’s forming with real customers in real sales situations as often as you can

– And, you have to be willing to take to heart what one of my executive partners in one of these efforts said when he admonished a Services team for not fully committing to the roadmap as it was forming. He said, “Get with the (expletive) program! If you’re not on the roadmap you’re off strategy!!!”

That was … and very much is … the point. A value roadmap is the strategy that can make all the difference. It has for the many companies with whom I’ve done this. It certainly did for the company and executive in the above story. Now, 10 years later, the company is leveraging version 6 of their roadmap as the clear leader of their market space. And that passionate executive is the CEO/President of the company!

Thomas Butta

If you’re intrigued with these concepts, you’ve likely noted that every trend comes with a frenzy of opinions and solutions, and everyone has his or her own take on what to do – or, more accurately, what to buy.

In the case of cloud computing, here’s what you see. Big dogs like IBM, HP, and VMware position themselves at the center of the enterprise with end-to-end proprietary solutions. Google and Amazon have served up off-the-shelf answers for every business type. IT stalwarts like Citrix, Red Hat and Microsoft have solutions that partner well with others. And challengers like Platform Computing have another set of answers.

Who is right? I’ve been immersed in cloud computing for the last nine months and I say it’s next to impossible to know amidst the clutter.

The phenomenon of hype and hawk is nothing new. The babble around big new categories has been going on for a long time. The technology industry is famous for it.

In the enterprise software category, ERP produced the first blurry blitz. SCM (supply chain management) followed next, then CRM and PLM (product lifecycle management). I rode that last wave at PTC.

Then there was Infrastructure and Middleware, Open Source (those heady days at Red Hat), Business Intelligence, and SaaS (software as a service).

In these instances and in many more like them, the common denominator is simply a mad rush by vendors to hype their particular solution.

Now put yourselves in the shoes of your customer decision-maker. Imagine you’re an IT executive, a cross-functional project leader or a senior-level business executive. How do you make sense of the madness? How do you figure out the truth from the hype? How do you determine the way to create and capture value? Whom do you trust?

Even the smartest customers have difficulty figuring it out. Most turn first to analysts who give them perspective on the playing field, but that only takes them so far. They really need someone else, someone who understands their particular pain, who can talk their language, and who can provide both strategic and tactical confidence.

So, what can you do if you’re one of those companies with something to offer?

The answer is clear: OWN THE PROBLEM. Become a thought leader. Stop talking about your stuff and start talking to the critical issues at play. Do this and you will not only stop contributing to the noise, you will stand apart from the noisemakers.

We did just that at PTC when PLM was heating up. We talked to decision-makers who confided that they were indeed confused. We saw, and they confirmed, there was no definitive answer on how to win in the product development world. Sure, there were lots of views on what should be done in, say, engineering or manufacturing or procurement, but a clearly articulated enterprise-wide approach did not exist. The consulting firms didn’t have it. The analysts didn’t have it. The business and engineering schools didn’t have it. Even the bookstores didn’t have it.

PTC consciously chose to shed its old ways of ‘demo and close’ to become the thought leader of a category that desperately needed someone to make sense of it all. We bet we could leverage a thought leadership position in PLM to turn the company around. It worked.

We created The Way to Product First, A Roadmap for Creating and Capturing Value. It was based on in-depth customer interviews and market insights. It was quite literally a fold-out map that showed where the value opportunities were with routes on how to realize them – from executing strategies to business initiatives to business processes to core competencies to infrastructure and technology needs. It was written in the customer’s own language. And, importantly, it did not feature a single PTC product or solution.

We retrained our sales force in value-based selling. We held intimate executive seminars and hands-on workshops for customers and partners. We published the Making Sense series of booklets beginning with PLM Schizophrenia, Making Sense of the Madness. We even partnered with MIT to conduct a joint executive education program that featured The Roadmap.

The thought leadership initiative was a strategic imperative – and a critical turning point – for this engineering and sales-centric company. It began in 2002 when PTC desperately needed to transform. It hit the mark for customers who were desperate for something just like it.

I am told by James Heppelmann, President of PTC today and a partner in the original effort, that The Roadmap continues to this day in version six. Its name has been modified to The PTC Value Roadmap, but it has gotten smarter and smarter with each successive year of learning. Congratulations to PTC for adopting this smart approach, investing behind it, and sticking with it.

For those of you facing a similar situation in a hot, blurry category, the lesson is clear. Don’t be part of the noise. Own the problem. Share your ideas. It’s the basis for differentiation and sustainable leadership.