You’ve almost certainly heard of SMART goals, but how do they relate to your technology roadmap objectives?
Defining clear goals for your roadmap initiatives is critical to measuring success. It will help you reach your success milestones, achieve objectives more effectively, and ensure your team is consistently working towards shared goals.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed about setting measurable, achievable objectives for each roadmap initiative, this post will show you how.
Align Your Goals to Your Business Strategy
Although vague mission statements can sound good, they rarely lead to real progress. So, when setting goals for your roadmap projects, start by understanding your strategic business goals.
Ensure every goal you set for your technology roadmap aligns with your long-term business objectives. Each project added to your roadmap should impact your strategic business goals and move your company in the right direction.
It’s easy to get sidetracked by current trends and what your competitors are doing, but by aligning your roadmap to your business objectives, you’ll keep your company on track to reach your pre-defined success metrics.
Keep the Number of Goals Realistic and Manageable
When your team has multiple goals to focus on, they’re more likely to get overwhelmed and focus on the ones they find easiest (or the KPIs that will keep them employed). Not only does this mean that valuable goals get sidetracked, but it also leaves you with a demoralized team.
Your roadmap will inevitably have multiple goals that run concurrently, but ensure you don’t overwhelm your team with an unrealistic number of goals simultaneously.
Make sure any goals with hard dependencies are also easy to manage. For example, you might have an initiative that relies on multiple teams. In this case, create a plan for handling the crossover (e.g., If and only if X happens in another team, then can we achieve Y in this team.).
Ensure that collaboration is easy with better communication tools, and ensure every team member is aware of their responsibilities and role within each initiative to keep everyone on track.
Use SMART Criteria
SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Every initiative you add to your technology roadmap should adhere to the SMART criteria to make it easy to track and review.
Avoid vague goals, such as “improve collaboration.”
Instead, make them as detailed as possible. For example: “We will improve collaboration between teams by X date by implementing Y software that will provide a new platform for team members to share ideas and give updates on progress. We will review progress on X date and conduct a staff survey to measure productivity changes. Quantitatively, we will measure the reduction of staff alignment meetings. Qualitatively, we will measure staff satisfaction on collaboration, communication, and software efficacy.”
The more specific your goals for your technology roadmap, the easier it is to implement action steps to reach them.
Implement Different Types of Goals
Most businesses focus on specific targets, like reducing costs by X% or increasing revenue by $X.
However, a strategic tech roadmap includes different types of goals focusing on different success metrics. For example, you could also include process adoption goals, such as “training 80% of users by X date” or “migrating X% of data to the new system by X date.”
Although these goals don’t have an objective ROI, they have value to the company and can be important in achieving strategic business goals.
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