Product strategy
Roadmap for the outcome
How to build an outcome-based roadmap: problems, outcomes, stakes, now-next-later, evidence and conversation with stakeholders.
Outcome-roadmap shows what behavioral or business changes the team intends to achieve and why it believes are achievable.It doesn’t promise a specific function by an arbitrary date, but it doesn’t remove responsibility: every bet requires a progress signal, a decision horizon, and a revision condition.
Why you need a roadmap for the end result
Definition of outcome-roadmap
Roadmap by outcome is a product development plan that focuses not on the task list but on the end results for business and users. Unlike the classic feature-roadmap with a focus on releases and features, the outcome-based approach answers the question of why we make these changes, what value we achieve.
Why “what and why” rather than “what and how”
The idea behind this approach is to move toward business goals consciously, rather than throwing out chaotic features, focusing on outcomes helps keep you from being dispersed and improves your chances of achieving strategic priorities, such as not just launching a review section, but getting NPS to grow by a certain amount in six months.
Example of application
B2B SaaS is not focused on new integration, but on the goal of increasing retention by 10% in 12 months due to the depth of service usage, and integration is only one step.
How to Create and Manage the Outcome Roadmap
Decomposition of Outcomes
Start with one or more of the key outcomes that a business expects from a product: growth in active users, decrease in churn, increase in LTV. Then break down the big goals into intermediate stages to which you can link tactical OKR metrics.
Example
If you want to increase revenue by 20% per year, spread this result on floors: new payment plans, increased adoption in large customers, additional services.
Relationship to Product Strategy
Outcomes should be based on strategic goals (sales segment growth, expansion into new markets, etc.) Be sure to lock the line-of-sight between the outcome and the strategic task, otherwise the team will begin to agree on the ground and lose focus.
Case: Entering a new segment
The company is entering SME with a new tariff: Outcome: 100 new SME customers in 3 months. Strategic objective: to occupy 5% of the market in a year. All the intermediate steps of the roadmap are built on this result, there are no “hanging in the air” tasks.
Prioritization in the outcome-roadmap
RTT (Reach-Target-Track)
Prioritization in outcome-roadmap is based on the principle of RTT: assess how much an action affects the mass of the result (Reach), how much it moves the final goal (Target), how you can measure and track progress (Track).
Example
Testing onboarding-flow can affect the conversion of new users noticeably more than launching a new storefront - although the latest project is “louder”.
Anti-patterns of prioritization
Mistakes happen when a roadmap turns into a set of tasks per quarter or a list of top managers’ wants, and the most dangerous thing is to replace outcomes with a long list of features with an obscure business role, the typical trap: schedule dozens of interface updates, but not ask yourself if they move key metrics.
Example-anti-pattern
Retail products spend six months on redesigning the cart, and the number of orders does not change due to the fact that the original problem is not in the UI, but in logistics.
Metrics and control tools
How to choose metrics for outcomes
A good outcome metric is a clear measure of whether you’re achieving your desired outcome, which can be NPS, retention, GMV, MAU, average check, which depends on the type of product and stage of development, and in practice, the metrics are chosen from the North Star Metrics top and the indirect metrics that you can actually track.
Example
If the target outcome is growth in mobile orders, the key metric is conversion rate of the mobile version.
Roadmap visualization tools
For the outcome-roadmap, Miro, ProductPlan, Notion, Jira Advanced Roadmaps are used to map goals and mark progress by actual results, not by task checklists. It’s important that metrics and projects are linked right on the dashboard, so that everyone can see the outcome.
How to implement the outcome-roadmap in the company
Stages of implementation: start, communication, verification
The first step is to explain to the whole team the logic of the approach: we’re not doing new things, we’re doing things for goals, and it’s helpful to start by mapping the old roadmap and the new roadmap, finding tasks without a clear link to outcomes, and removing them or transforming them.
Next, we have regular synchronies on progress: not just about closed tasks, but about shifts in outcome. Watch the metrics, ask the question: is this initiative moving us closer to the goal or just eating up resources?
Example
The platform product collected different wants from departments. After the implementation of the outcome-roadmap, almost a third of tasks were removed as non-focus tasks, and for the same resource jumped into the retention target a quarter earlier.
Common errors in implementation
The main mistake is to stay in the task-driven mindset: keep thinking about tasks as key outcomes. Another trick is to hammer on measurability: outcomes without a clear metric are just slogans. It’s important to link each task to the obvious benefit to the business or the user, otherwise the focus is blurred.
FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions
How is the outcome roadmap different from the usual food roadmap?
Unlike the task list and the release list, the outcome roadmap only captures the initiatives that lead to the key goals of the business and users.
How to measure the success of the roadmap?
Through target outcomes metrics, such as revenue growth, downflows, NPS growth, these data are tracked in dashboards and compared with planned ones.
How can we explain the value of this approach to business?
Show business that the team is not just producing features, but consistently moving towards strategic indicators: revenue, market share, retention.
How much is it worth planning at the same time?
Usually 2-4 outcomes per quarter. If you take more, the team loses focus, the connections between the tasks and the results are lost.
Can you combine the outcome and feature-roadmap?
For example, you can do a retrospective on outcomes, and for the front/back you can use an extra feature taskboard.
Where to look for benchmarks of outcome metrics?
In industry reports (e.g., Mixpanel Benchmarks), in the analytics of public companies.