Predicting the future with the time machine
The time machine is the perfect format for predicting the future of the industry, the technology and the company’s products. Find out how it works in the live webinar.
Roadmapping rarely plays a role in small craft businesses. There is no product or service roadmap. Small businesses simply don’t need one. Order processing comes first. Conceptual product development is rare or non-existent. And everyone in the company knows where the boss is when guidance is needed.
The larger, more complex and more diverse companies become, the more difficult it is for everyone to keep their bearings. With a growing service portfolio, teams working on several projects in parallel and managers who are no longer available on call, the problem grows. The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. And the third and fourth hands (development and sales) are again at odds about what the product should look like tomorrow and what the customer should buy. There is a lack of coordination within the teams and across functions and business units.
Lack of direction, frictional losses, conflicting priorities and a lack of strength to drive major innovations forward together. All capacities are busy and yet no real progress is being made. Opportunities are missed, resources are used inefficiently and company goals are not achieved.
Companies usually don’t notice the lack of structure in their day-to-day business. Somehow, everyone knows what the company is doing. Budding self-doubt is quickly covered up with actionism. Everyone is busy and the arguments as to how everything naturally fits in with the corporate strategy are naturally at the ready. No one voluntarily dares to say that they don’t know where the journey is going. But most people aren’t really sure either.
Especially in B2B, where development and investment cycles are long, the effects of a lack of coordination can be devastating. Before the company realizes it, the organization has backed the wrong horses for a few years and missed out on relevant developments. The competitor shows its innovation at the trade fair, the company’s own development lags behind, and somehow everyone knew that it had to come to this one day.
Where markets are dynamic, customer requirements and technological progress are advancing rapidly and competitive pressure is correspondingly high, a single year without a clear roadmap is a major risk. Delayed product launches, dwindling market relevance and the growing feeling of being left behind. Once self-confidence begins to crumble, it becomes difficult to motivate your own organization. And a lack of motivation also makes it difficult to inspire customers.
Roadmapping means developing a clear roadmap of where the organization should be heading in the next five, ten or 50 years. This roadmap serves as a guide for all those involved as to which priorities have been set, which topics are relevant in the medium term and what the vision or North Star is for the coming years.
Roadmapping and roadmaps differ from strategy development in many respects:
Roadmapping therefore helps to focus innovation and development efforts on the essentials. By creating a timeline for planned features, enhancements and strategic initiatives, the roadmap helps prioritize tasks, allocate resources effectively and maintain a rapid pace of development. This proactive approach not only minimizes risk, but empowers teams to make quick, well-informed decisions that ensure the company’s long-term success.
Roadmapping is a complex topic. It is therefore important to work on it in one piece if possible. Iteration loops, e-mail ping-pong and distributed activities multiply the complexity too much. Roadmapping is in danger of failing because a truly uniform picture never emerges. And when a clear picture is created, two thirds of the people are dissatisfied and there is no commitment to implementation.
Therefore only three big, compact steps to the roadmap:
What should the roadmap show?
What degrees of freedom should there be, at what point is there a ‘ban on thinking’?
Defined strategic goals, existing roadmaps or current plans for market expansion and business model changes are important cornerstones for the future. Whether they should really be seen as hard limits or can be questioned as part of roadmapping depends primarily on the participants and decision-making powers.
Who decides, who has a clue and who should we not forget?
Not everyone can contribute to the roadmap . Not with manageable effort. Large group workshops with 60 or more people developing joint roadmaps are possible but rare. In a typical case, the company management or divisional management participates in the roadmapping with their direct team members. In addition, ten, 20 or even 30 other people can provide valuable input in preliminary discussions. It is important to think cross-functionally in order to have all the relevant insights and priorities.
Developing visions and images of the future is exhausting and difficult for many. The right framing, the right mindset and a few tools help you to think in a visionary way. This way, the roadmap becomes a real glimpse into the future instead of just a copy of everything that everyone is already working on.
Three small groups achieve more than one large one. And above all, they get things done faster. Teams could be divided into different phases of the value chain, different business areas or different product categories. It is important to not only fill the teams with experts, but to mix the perspectives. The view from the outside is at least as important as the experience on the topic. Diverse teams are an important success factor.
Roadmapping means putting the future in slices on a timeline. To do this, we have to predict the future. Not the lottery numbers, but the relevant, major changes in the company’s environment, in the industry and, above all, in the target group. What does the customer of tomorrow want? What does not work? What technologies, needs and trends will shape the next 5, 10 or 15 years? And what does this mean for our company and the products and services that we can contribute in this future?
The time machine is the perfect format for predicting the future of the industry, the technology and the company’s products. Find out how it works in the live webinar.
Good visions are too big to be implemented immediately. They may be achievable in one or two decades. Hardly any company can afford to spend so much time on research and development. The path there therefore needs intermediate stages that are valuable revenue generators in their own right. Multi-generation planning breaks down the vision into the first possible product (minimum viable product, MVP) and further intermediate products, technologies or solutions up to the final vision.
The prospects of the individual teams currently stand for themselves. Just like the multi-generation plans and other dimensions such as platform technologies, markets or product categories. Now is the time to share, discuss and add to these images. And to weave a coherent tapestry from the puzzle pieces. As the tapestry grows, so does the understanding of perspectives and the consistency of the overall picture. Good workshop moderation ensures that the group grows together on the topic and does not disperse in conflict.
Once the picture is clear, it is time for implementation. Defining the first steps and responsibilities directly feeds the team’s commitment even before everyone goes back to their daily business. An initial timetable shows when each initiative or function will be tackled and how the individual results will support each other. Resource availability and potential risks will certainly become an issue here. It is important not to let the motivational thread break here.
A rough picture is created in the roadmapping workshop: Handwritten notes, sketches, scraps of words and perhaps a few quick prototypes. This rough picture is difficult to transport into the organization. Pouring the quintessence into text form, finding a few analogies and sketching a clear visualization makes what has been worked out communicable and transportable.
The first round of communication must include clarification questions and feedback. Only a small group has produced a result that should be groundbreaking for the entire company. This is not possible without missing pieces of the puzzle and a need for clarification in detail. As soon as the initial clarifications have been made, the tasks can be distributed to other implementing staff from all functional areas. Research, development, sales, product management and marketing are often the first to rework their messages. And, of course, innovation management.
A good roadmap is a North Star with concrete milestones. The organization’s tasks can largely be based on this. And yet what emerged from the roadmap workshop is not yet reflected in reality. They are all just assumptions. Assumptions, mind you, made by experts who have a good understanding of the market. But the experts themselves are most often wrong about the reality ‘out there’. The assumptions of the roadmap must therefore be checked. Do customers really want this? Are these really products that meet their needs? Have the technical approaches not already been recognized as dead ends elsewhere? The safest and quickest way to validate this is through well-conducted customer interviews.
As a living document, the roadmap grows with progress, incorporates successfully completed milestones and continues to evolve. Internal progress, changes in the market, in technology and in customer requirements are important influencing factors that need to be responded to. This iterative process ensures that the company does not fall into a blinkered mindset, but acts with a view to reality. The roadmap is calibrated at regular intervals. This often takes place as part of the annual strategy development process. This institutionalizes the development of innovations, focuses efforts in technology and secures future business success in the long term.
Management consulting is a matter of trust. Let’s talk briefly about your challenge and find out whether we could work together.
The future portfolio of industrial and technology companies are core topics of the innovation consultancy TOM SPIKE. We provide support in the strategic alignment of the future portfolio and the organization, in roadmapping and in innovation projects for individual products and technologies. The Time Machine workshop format, which has been successfully used by cable manufacturer Lapp, among others, is particularly suitable for the core of roadmap development (further references).
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