Tying Roadmap to Business Outcomes

Top Product Leaders Always Get This Right

👋 Hello Technocrats!

Out of 100 roadmaps maybe 20% to 30% are clearly tied to business outcomes. Most are a mixture of someone’s hopes & dreams plus a lot of straight up wild guesses about the future. Today we’re going to do things the right way & figure out how to tie roadmap projects to business outcomes.

Cheers & let’s dive in!

Bobby

Let’s start with this: a lot of companies simply DON’T CARE if they blow budget on a roadmap that doesn’t drive any critical business outcomes.

Unbelievable, you say?

Nope. It’s totally true.

A lot of businesses think of Product & Engineering as a place they HAVE to spend money but NOT a place where they have to figure out what they get in return (ROI).

Imagine doing this in Sales! But hey, that’s how a lot of organizations operate and maybe they’re doing just fine regardless and that’s OK.

But if you’re in that kind of company and want to change things so your organization moves towards a better way of designing their roadmap then this topic is perfect for you.

Why No Traceability?

Traceability is a word we’re going to use a lot.

Traceability from your roadmap projects to business outcomes is vital when designing a roadmap that delivers on key success metrics for the company.

So why do businesses often lack traceability in their roadmaps?

1. The business doesn’t know what their business outcomes even are!

2. Teams confuse creating output with delivering outcomes (2 different things)

3. Fear of accountability if there’s a miss

4. Businesses that are making good money can be lazy

5. No one asked the Product Leader for it and he/she doesn’t know any better

6. Too many pet projects or fluffy initiatives that don’t connect to the core business

7. Everyone thinks short term targets, therefore long-term outcomes are out the window

There are a few others but you get the gist.

Almost all good companies have strong traceability between roadmap initiatives and business outcomes.

The Trouble with Business Outcomes

Let’s be honest, any of us can come up with a number of roadmap projects & initiatives for our teams to work on - that’s not too difficult.

But it’s the business outcomes that are the troublesome piece.

It might be tempting to say, “what’s so difficult, just drive revenue or gross margin.” Well, it’s not as easy as that.

Business outcomes can actually be very difficult to define for many companies for a number of different reasons and this can be a big hurdle for Product Leaders.

Let’s look at 5 popular examples of business outcomes:

1. Revenue

2. Gross Margin

3. Customer NPS Scores

4. ACV (Annual Contract Value)

5. Market Expansion

Which one of these does Product own?

The answer is none of them!

This lack of ownership is one of the key reasons why Product Leaders have a hard time building traceability into their roadmaps.

i.e. Product is not typically responsible for defining the desired business outcomes. That’s up to the Board, CEO, CFO and others.

So if the business hasn’t defined the outcomes Product is stuck with its roadmap.

In fact, business outcomes are VERY often cross-functional, slow to move, and messy to measure.

As a result Product Teams retreat to comfort metrics: features shipped, story points burned, velocity charts and so forth instead of outcomes.

It’s Partially Products Fault

We could sit here and blame the business side for not having their act together on the outcomes but let’s not do that.

Instead, let’s take some accountability for ourselves.

Here are the reasons Product screws up traceability in their roadmaps:

1. Frankly sometimes product leaders don’t understand how the business makes money

2. Product often likes building features for the hell of it

3. Product can sometimes be bad at saying no to stakeholders, so every idea makes its way in to the roadmap

4. There is a philosophy in MANY product circles that “if you build it, they will come”…yes, even after all these years

5. Product often overly focuses on the mechanics of sprints, burn-down charts and various other operational metrics instead of outcomes

So, product teams can also be immature with how they think about traceability. In fact, they can become distracted & lead astray from delivering business outcomes quite easily.

We’ve all seen product teams fight the next fire. And the next, and the next. Pretty soon they’re functioning as nothing more than technical support for their customers!

Fixing the Issue

As a Product Leader, if you want to fix the issue, here’s what you have to do:

These are your 10 commandments for building traceability into your roadmap:

1. Force the Hand of the ELT

CEOs and exec teams often *think* they’ve defined business outcomes—but haven’t. As Product Leader, sometimes it’s your job to push, nag, schedule painful meetings, and drive clarity across the ELT. It might feel like you’re doing the CEOs job and to some degree you probably are but if you want the outcomes nailed down you’re going to have to lead. You might have to whiteboard things yourself, run a prioritization workshop, or even write the first draft of company goals. If the exec team can’t agree on what the business is trying to achieve, *nothing you put on a roadmap will ever matter.*

2. Offer to Shut Down Product

Sometimes if you really want to drive clarity and even earn trust, you can go nuclear: ask the exec team, *“What would happen if we paused Product for 6 months?”* It’s a forcing function. It reveals what the business actually depends on—and what it doesn’t. This bold move shifts the conversation from “what should we build next” to “what are the most critical problems we exist to solve?” It also exposes pet projects, vanity work, and busywork masquerading as use products. Sometimes, the fastest way to build an outcome-driven roadmap is to show what the business loses without one.

3. Build a Straw-man

Don’t wait for perfect input or cross-functional alignment to magically materialize—go first. Build a rough draft of what traceability *could* look like. The simplest version? A spreadsheet. One column for roadmap initiatives, another for the business outcomes, then the expected KPI or outcome. It doesn’t need to be right—it just needs to exist. A tangible straw-man gives everyone something to react to, debate, and refine. It transforms vague talk about priorities into a concrete conversation about tradeoffs and impact. Most importantly, it shows leadership and gets the alignment process moving.

4. Learn How to Teach

Your job isn’t just cranking out product plans, it’s helping everyone around you understand *why* any of it matters. Traceability only sticks if people *get it*. That means learning how to teach. Not just broadcasting, but actually breaking down how initiatives connect to business outcomes in a way that sticks with execs, PMs, engineers, and even sales. Use analogies. Repeat yourself. Make diagrams. Walk the floor. If your team can’t explain *why* they’re building something in terms the CFO would understand, you haven’t taught it well enough yet. Great product leaders don’t just build, they educate constantly.

5. Work Across the Aisle

If your roadmap is built in a Product vacuum, it’s already broken. Traceability requires deep collaboration with Sales, CS, Marketing, Finance, and Ops. Why? Because the outcomes you’re trying to drive usually live outside your org. Churn lives in CS. ACV lives in Sales. Margin lives in Finance. You need their context, their pain points, and their partnership to make the roadmap real. Get in their meetings. Invite them into yours. Treat them like co-authors, not stakeholders.

6. Test Things Frequently

Don’t wait until launch day to find out if something’s a dud. Test early, test scrappy, and test often—mockups, sales convos, prototypes, whatever gives you signal. Then *show your work* to the ELT. Share what resonated with customers, what fell flat, and what real users are telling you. This is how you *build traceability upstream*—by validating that the thing you're proposing actually solves a real problem before it hits the roadmap. It shifts the conversation from gut feel to evidence, making every roadmap item easier to defend and easier to tie back to outcomes.

7. Partner with the CFO

Let’s be real, most business outcomes are financial. Revenue, margin, CAC, retention cost, expansion efficiency… all of it lives in the CFO’s world. So if you want traceability that holds up in front of the board, you need Finance in the loop from the start. Don’t just bring them a list of projects—bring them into the *why*. Co-model impact. Ask how they’d measure success. Use their language, not just product speak. When you partner with Finance, you turn your roadmap into an investment plan, not a wish list.

8. Build Influence

You can have the cleanest roadmap and the sharpest logic in the world—but none of it matters if you can’t navigate the people. Traceability lives and dies in backchannel buy-in, and soft power. As CPO, you’ve got to manage egos, align conflicting agendas, and know when to push versus when to let someone feel like it was their idea. This isn’t about playing games—it’s about coalition-building. The outcomes are cross-functional, so your influence has to be too. Get good at the politics of influence, or your roadmap won’t survive.

9. Leverage Great Data

Traceability also depends on signal vs noise. If you're flying blind on data related to customer behavior, sales blockers, churn drivers, or margin killers, your roadmap will reflect that. Great data turns fuzzy ideas into focused bets. Use sales win/loss reports, product analytics, support logs, and financial dashboards—not just to justify decisions, but to *inform* them from the start. And don’t hoard it. Share the data with the ELT, tie it directly to roadmap decisions, and let it shape what stays and what gets cut. Data builds credibility, and confidence. Without it, you’re just guessing louder than everyone else.

10. Make Traceability a Ritual

If you want traceability to stick, it can’t be a one-time exercise—it has to become part of how the team operates. Bake it into roadmap reviews, team OKRs, product briefs, launch retros, and even Slack threads. Ask *“what outcome does this drive?”* until it becomes second nature. The goal isn’t to create more process—it’s to build muscle memory. When teams start asking that question without being prompted, you’ve officially made traceability part of the culture.

If you need help with any of this email me at bobby@technocratic.io

And in the meantime, keep the shark swimming! 🦈

Bobby