A high-level roadmap is a key planning tool which paves the way for your team to stay focused on the main activities.
After all the challenges and hurdles, you have founded a startup with clear vision and mission. Other steps that you might have taken include completion of your business model canvas, creating a suitable business name and value proposition, and making a business plan complete with financial projections.
So, what next? Several people jump straight into action, spending much of their time working on their product, ignoring other key aspects of their startup business.
This is the right time to use a strategy roadmap.
Your startup strategy roadmap will help you regulate:
– The ability you need to get your startup off the ground and expanding.
– The actions you should take to execute those abilities.
Strategy roadmaps are your indispensable tool for helping you prioritise the next step for your business.
It will help you look at the business in regards to workflows, methods, skills, facilities, technology, and culture.
Various startups have made the mistake of concentrating heavily on physical aspects, such as technology. Here are some things you should do to help your startup.
1. A strategic roadmap is essential to your Investors
Always have a robust business plan that highlights financial projections for growth, backed by a great pitch deck.
Typical stakeholders in a startup include:
Project owner
Project manager
Project development team
Investors
Sales and marketing team
The approach you opt for a strategy roadmap will demonstrates a well-articulated plan for your startup. This includes outlining specific business capabilities, key objectives, and well-sequenced initiatives on an easily walkable roadmap.
This will assure your investors that you have a disciplined yet simple approach to spending their hard-earned capital, which is not spent on activities that are non-urgent.
2. Challenges
The next step is to define your challenges your startup will face at this point in time.
You’ll face a different set of hurdles at every stage of your startup, be it formation, to seed funding, and beyond.
In the nascent stages, these challenges often revolve around funding, finding the right founding team, or finalising your first MVP of the product.
The tactic is to identify only the current top 5-6 challenges that scream for attention.
3. Objectives
For your startup to be on your ideal roadmap, setting key objectives is the next step.
Set your objectives based on your current challenges, as it will make it clear what you want to achieve and what represents success.
4. Actions
Now, you’ll have to determine the actions needed to change your most essential capabilities.
If you are puzzled as to what actions to take next, think about what makes up a capability. Actions revolve around people – hiring, training, etc.; processes – creating processes, fixing broken processes; and physical – upgrading systems, obtaining funding, etc.
This is an appropriate stage to identify ballpark costs and benefits to help you with deciding on the next step.
Your Startup Roadmap
Firstly, prioritise and sequence your tasks and then plot them on the roadmap.
Once you’ve established your initiatives, it’s time to create your roadmap. Start with a simple grid.
Now, plan each of your initiatives on the grid in an executable sequence.
Avoid trying to do everything in the first horizon, as most startups bite off more than they can chew. Keep focus on the high priority initiatives rather than trying to do everything straight up.
To conclude
There you have it – these five simple steps should suffice your strategy roadmap for your startup.
You can choose not to follow the steps sequentially. When you’ll create your strategy roadmap, your mind might be all over the place. Then set some challenges and objectives and go to your roadmap and establish some initiatives and actions.
Now, validate those initiatives against your capability map to measure priority.
When you’ll create your strategy roadmaps, you’ll face new challenges as initiatives get completed, new capabilities are required, which is why picking a versatile roadmap tool is very helpful. As Startup businesses constantly evolve, so should your strategy roadmap.