Roadmapping - A Road to Success?

A corporate barbecue might seem an unlikely place to practise strategy. For Dr. Clemens Chaskel, it offered a useful demonstration. Working with a client in China whose employees had spent weeks in workshops, he suggested planning an event together. The first question was why they wanted it. Feeding people was hardly the point. Helping colleagues from different levels talk, feel appreciated and reconnect was much closer to the purpose.

That changed the plan, from the activities to the responsibilities and resources. In this episode of Innovation Rockstars, Chaskel joins Dr. Christian Mühlroth to explain why the same reasoning belongs in technology and innovation strategy. Drawing on his work with the Institute for Manufacturing at the University of Cambridge, he describes roadmapping as a way to connect intent with action. The result should help people make decisions together and give them a clearer reason to follow through.

Start with the connections, not the chart

Chaskel’s interest in the subject grew from a problem he observed while working on R&D projects: innovation activity could become detached from the organisation’s wider strategy.

A roadmap helps make those connections explicit. It brings together the reasons for acting, the desired outcome, the steps required, the resources and the timing. A high-level view can fit on one page, with more detailed roadmaps showing how individual areas contribute.

Those documents need to connect. A technology roadmap should relate to product choices, which in turn should relate to corporate direction. Otherwise, teams can create plans that each make sense locally without showing how they support the same business.

The starting point can vary. A company may see an opportunity in an existing technical capability, or begin with a customer problem that its current products do not address. Chaskel often starts with the desired outcome because it leaves room to consider different responses, including services or business model changes.

Invite the people who hold missing pieces

A technology strategy needs more than technology experts in the room. Product, customer and financial perspectives help expose dependencies that any one function may overlook. Chaskel is emphatic about the risk of involving too few people.

“If you're not sure whether a person's involvement is required or not, invite them and if they get bored they can always leave the room.”

Senior leadership also needs to participate and support the effort. If everyday business repeatedly takes precedence over the workshops, the team receives a clear signal about the importance of the work.

This is not a criticism of specialists for lacking the complete picture. Chaskel points out that understanding every other function is not their role. The process must make that knowledge available. Bringing people together is part of building a strategy they can understand and implement.

Stop repeating the annual strategy exercise

Chaskel describes a familiar pattern. Management asks teams for information about projects and capacity. Presentations are assembled, conclusions are drawn and a strategy returns to the people expected to deliver it. Those people are already busy, so implementation waits. A year later, the exercise begins again.

His objection is to the separation between making the strategy and doing the work. If R&D teams help shape the direction from the beginning, they have a better understanding of why it matters and how their decisions contribute.

He jokes that a consultant could welcome repeat business, but finds the lack of progress disappointing. His preferred outcome is an organisation that learns to use the approach itself.

That requires more than producing a polished document. It means reviewing how strategic thinking fits the company’s existing routines, who takes part and what needs to change for decisions to become action.

Make the method fit the organisation

Chaskel describes applying roadmapping to the introduction of roadmapping itself. The team examines the organisation’s needs, maturity and participants, then works out how to establish a useful practice.

He warns against trying to move from nothing to an elaborate system in one attempt. Too much detail can expand the scope, obscure the original problem and make implementation expensive or difficult.

A more practical approach breaks a distant ambition into tangible goals. Some may be achievable in the next six months. Others will require outside help, new resources or organisational changes. Seeing these on a shared timeline helps teams discuss the sequence.

Iteration matters here as much as it does in product development. A pilot reveals what works and what needs adjustment. Chaskel is sceptical of claims that a company has quickly produced a perfect plan for the next decade. The method should remain adaptable as the organisation learns.

Put sustainability into the same strategic conversation

Sustainability gives Chaskel another example of why connected plans matter. He asks listeners to imagine a manufacturer setting an emissions-reduction ambition. Milestones can make the goal more concrete, but the discussion becomes more useful when it also reaches product generations, technology choices and business models.

His examples are hypothetical. A company might reconsider its product platform rather than only adding technology to reduce the impact of an existing one. Another might investigate whether a waste output has value to a different industry. Neither opportunity should be assumed without investigation.

“You can then convene all those stakeholders to discuss this topic with one goal: making the company more sustainable while earning money doing it.”

The roadmap provides a place to examine those relationships and decide what needs testing. It cannot guarantee the outcome.

Chaskel’s own memorable innovation moment came when his startup found a promising product-market fit after several pivots. The satisfaction came from seeing the work lead somewhere. That is also the standard he sets for roadmapping: a shared direction that changes decisions, survives contact with experience and helps people take the next useful step.