What is a digital roadmap and why does your team need one?

Find out how to help your team get your digital ducks in a row and get aligned on a digital approach for the future.

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At Hatchd, we collaborate with clients daily to strategise, design, and deliver their digital products and platforms.

Throughout our partnerships, we've recognised that product teams often face difficulties in ensuring a consistent digital experience for their end users. These challenges stem from a variety of issues, including a lack of a clear vision, disjointed digital services and channels, team inefficiencies, process ambiguity, and competing priorities.

In response to these challenges, we've created a framework designed to aid product teams in developing and maintaining a cohesive digital roadmap and strategy.

It contains key steps and insights required to craft an effective plan to align all the digital products with a single, coherent vision, deliver better services to users, forecast resources and budget effectively, and instil a culture of collaboration within teams.

Read on to find out how we helped several of our clients get their digital ducks in a row.

What we did

First of all, what is a digital roadmap?

A digital roadmap aligns all digital initiatives to one core vision, outlining the key actions and steps required to achieve the short, medium and long term goals that support this vision, and enables clients to ultimately better serve their end users.

All outputs from our workshops are captured in one digital whiteboard and the approach can be broken down into the following stages:

• Immersion
• Visioning
• Ideation and Prioritisation
• Roadmapping
• Concepting
• Evolution

Immersion

We begin by conducting a series of discovery workshops with key stakeholders from the client's business, including subject matter experts, user representatives, designers, product managers, marketing, and the development team.

During these workshops, we immerse ourselves in the client's world, aiming to gain a deep understanding of their existing digital landscape, business strategy, tools, processes, digital products, current constraints, user data, and any ongoing initiatives. This approach enables us to identify pain points and areas for improvement.

We start with group sessions to identify broader themes and then deep dive into 1:1 catch-ups to gather more detailed requirements.

Session facilitation is a key factor in knowing the right questions to ask to uncover pertinent organisational insights.

In general there are 2-3 members of Hatchd within these sessions to help manage client stakeholders and their expectations effectively to achieve the desired outcome for each discovery session.

Visioning

Based on the information gathered during the immersion phase, we develop a long term vision that will provide value to their customers and stakeholders, outlining the purpose of what digital is for that organisation / team. Following this, we develop short and long term goals to achieve and enable this vision.

Ideation and Prioritisation

Collaboratively, we systematically transform the user, team, and technology pain points and requirements identified in previous stages into opportunities. This method enables us to align the solutions to meet the real needs that help the organisation achieve the vision and goals established in the Immersion Phase.

These ideas are then prioritised using a customised framework that can be reused in the future by the working group, as outlined in further detail in the Evolution stage.

Roadmapping

Arguably the most important phase, we then define the short, medium and long term sequence of achievable pieces of work that make the bulk of the digital roadmap. This is a living document, that is to be referred to in the future.

Concepting

If required, we conceptualise ideas to facilitate buy-in from other client stakeholders outside of the working group. Throughout this process, we collaborate with the client team to help them conceptualise (and sometimes design) these ideas to communicate these to stakeholders who may be external to the discovery process. This could take a multitude of forms, for instance design concepts of a new homepage, or the design of the top-voted initiative by the working group that sparks the most joy.

Evolution

Once the roadmap is created, the organisation now possesses all the necessary tools to commence work on the roadmap initiatives. We also encourage teams to regularly revisit the roadmap as a group, continuously analysing data and user feedback to inform their priorities ensuring a consistent delivery of value to clients and the business, and aligning with their digital vision and goals.

Sustained value and direction from digital

Across several clients, the outputs of our digital roadmap engagements typically included the following. Outputs are tailored to the client’s unique ecosystem and requirements to ensure that they are fit for purpose for their needs.

• A vision and clear goals for digital initiatives within the organisation;
• A backlog of ideas based on user, business and technology requirements, for instance user tracking for key functionality and automating analysis of customer insights;
• A prioritisation framework that can be used internally within the organisation going forwards;
• An ecosystem and concepts showing how the digital (and physical) touchpoints are connected to deliver the vision;
• A roadmap outlining projects/activities that need to take place, the steps required to achieve the vision and goals and guidance and advice on stakeholder management; amd
• Recommendation on team allocation to deliver on activities/projects outlined in the roadmap.

As a part of this process, bringing together leaders and team members within these organisations helps to facilitate the start of a collaborative culture.

The framework we have crafted and refined helps identify and solve their digital strategy pain points, tailored to the client’s digital ecosystem. This approach has been iterated on and validated across a variety of different organisations, and we work closely together to coach them throughout the roadmapping process to ensure that they can effectively take this process and use it internally for their own strategic purposes going forwards.

Several months on from delivering these roadmaps to clients, our stakeholders have seen firsthand how they have improved their organisation.

The roadmap provides an aligned plan to inform budget forecasting, including recruitment and resourcing needs. Team alignment was seen to improve, with teams and their surrounding stakeholders aligned on a clear vision and goals. Based on real user, business and technology needs, the roadmap facilitates a step-by-step plan on how to deliver better digital services to customers.

Through our digital strategy roadmap, we have empowered several of our clients to align their digital initiatives to a shared vision, and provided them with a defined roadmap to support their users more effectively for the short, medium and long term.