 Hello everybody and welcome back to another let's discuss with Parsons TKO Today our topic is going to be on road mapping And trying to really just get in and break down what that means What we mean by it and you know with this one? We're actually Really interested if you in the public want to leave us some comments and thoughts after you hear us talk about this If you think road mapping is still the right name or not We'd be very interested to hear from you if you got some ideas for us. We'd love to incorporate them I am very lucky today. It's a small let's discuss But I'm joined by my co-founding partner Nate Parsons and we haven't we rarely get to have one-on-one conversations like this anymore So I'm quite excited for today's conversation Nate. Oh Me too, Tony. It's great to be here with you and again This is a topic that's near dear to my heart and something that you know I've been trying to promote across our organization other organizations for over a decade So I'm glad to be here to talk about it. Let's you know, like we like to say these are informed, but informal conversations And you know, we try to focus in on different tactics for modern engagement strategies and when we think about road mapping, you know I guess that's where we could even just start right there. What is that the right name and what do we mean by road mapping? So when you when you think of road mapping, what does that mean to you? Yeah, that's a great point, you know red mapping I think you know and it sort of implies that you're starting somewhere and you're getting to someplace and there'll be a destination And I think that's one of the struggles with the name is that's not really what road mapping is about, you know Like road mapping is really about the the act of constantly Course-correcting and making good smart choices about where you're headed towards a long-term goal, you know And you may or may not ever achieve that goal Especially if you're a non-profit or a think tank or somebody who's focused on sort of, you know Long-term societal change that might be over the course of you know Generations not just over the course of a couple years, but you know to bring it down a little level You know a lot of what road mapping is about is about dealing with change, you know And it comes down to that which is that especially in the technology world everybody sort of knows Instinctively that technology changes and there's a lot of evolution and new things are developed But what's not really considered as front of mind with that Which I think red mapping really helps with is how do you gracefully stop doing something or remove? Something so that you can take advantage of these new evolutions of these new new technologies and how do you sort of smartly plan to overcome? You know things where you've invested heavily in something that is becoming Not the focal point of the future for how people are going to address that same issue or new technologies eclipsing that or maybe you're even Organizational focus has shifted. I mean a simple example of that may be that you know at one point Many non-profits had phone banks where they reached out to people and actually called people on the telephone to kind of interact with them You know and when email came along a lot of organizations had to switch entire parts of their structure and their organization How they conducted outreach to focus on email and it's not just a different communications mechanism And it's not just new technology, but it's a whole different cadence. You know when you're on the phone. It's real time It's back and forth. There's questions There's inner you know interactivity and then email it's very different You know you send something email and they consume it and maybe they click through to read something else Maybe they reply maybe they forward someone else But it's a very different dynamic and you know road mapping helps you plan for that kind of organizational shift Which isn't just you know getting a new one-to-one replacement thing, but potentially needing to address a whole Raft of organizational change issues that come along with the technology shift Yeah, I mean when she's saying that I it makes me think about staffing, right? The phone bank example, you don't need as many people to run your marketing email campaign as you did to manage the phones So when you think about the roadmap or the trajectory or maybe it's more like portfolio and compass planning Do you think about adding in staffing to that model? How do you predict? You know, we know systems are going to change right and they come and they go to your point What do we do with the staff around that? Right exactly and which skills are more evergreen which ones might you be invested in just for a couple of years And that might imply how you want to invest in those, right? You maybe you want to have you know a partner firm an external firm that's helping with something You don't think is going to be a long-term skill set for your organization versus the you know Communication strategy and outreach strategy, which might be very long-term and you definitely want to keep that in-house You know, and I think that changes the model as well And the price points have come down a lot You know for a lot of nonprofits and think tanks and even small businesses in the commercial sector The cost of a staff person was so high You know or once you invested in them We wanted them to do as many things as possible and conversely the cost of external help through services or technology or people was also So high you often felt like it was cheaper and easier to be a little inefficient and learn to do it in-house Then it was to outsource it, you know And that math has really changed a lot in the last 15 years, you know We're you know, we all know that you can you know have food delivered to you You can have your laundry delivered to you can have all of these things done at just a little commodity Pricing level, you know, it's not you know, 10x what it would be if you did it yourself It's 1.25 or 1.3x or something of what you could do it yourself But you get all the benefits of being able to turn it on and off instead of using it for an entire month You can use it for five days of the month, you know There's all these advantages to it not being permanently part of your organization And that's a big shift and that's also what roadmap can help with which is how do we transition from a we do everything? mentality to we do the important things mentality Hmm. Yeah, I mean, I like that layer a lot when you think about it, right? It's really turned into air quote the gig economy So can I find an expert in this one piece? But what are the the master tools or systems or skills that are going to drive us forward that? You really need someone in-house to manage that aspect of the strategy to be able to talk to the neighbor over there In a way that you couldn't have you know Somebody coming in and just tweaking something for a little bit or you know, we always talk about it with our data strategy Do you really need an in-house? data analytics officer or can you get that every quarter and get that expertise that really Find tune honing on your reporting You know if you had it in-house I could see it being busy for a year, but then it goes down So it seems like that's something that probably cascades into the roadmap along with then budgeting I always find that to be Disinteresting dilemma in the nonprofit mission-driven space, which is it's this annual budget cycle So then we think about for that year what we'll budget for but technology as you've said and as we know It just keeps changing right you needed it every year and then you need to be Cumulatively adding to it. I think is always the pain points like oh gosh I have to redo this website redesign again. It's every two years. Why does this keep happening? So I don't have a gimmicky to talk to that too I mean how you can if you're stuck in an annual budget cycle use something like this roadmap to Project out where you kind of see the technology stack going Yeah, that's really it's an interesting piece of the puzzle You know, I think um, you know one of the things that we have started to adopt internally is heavier use of You know objectives and key results as a framework for kind of measuring progress towards these sort of longer term objectives And one of the benefits of using a framework like that is it focuses a lot of your attention on quarters And so if you're on an annual budgeting cycle, you might want to say instead of us allocating the budget across four quarters Let's make an allocation for the first quarter Measure how we're doing against that and then reinforce the areas that we want and you know Maybe slow down or you know stall out spending in areas that we don't think are as promising Because you know that gives you more command and control of where to flex you might you saw the Same bucket of money, you know for the whole year, but how it's allocated can change a little bit more Concisely and it's easier to report on why you're changing directions and what you're getting from terms of a return on investment If you're measuring it against those objectives You know, and I think that also allows for you know potentially Each quarter to have slightly different objectives, which could be valuable, you know I think if there's a big technology shift Or something happens like you know just recently, you know Apple has launched a credit card and let's say that you weren't unable to process the credit card currently But you had a lot of folks who were trying to donate with that credit card and you hadn't budgeted for that last year You don't want to wait an entire year before you can start taking donations from that card, right? And so, you know, that becomes an instant priority when a new potential You know vector for donations comes in and if you have ok ours and one of your objectives is that we're going to you know Collect money from the most, you know likely donors, you know, that can address Shifting money around and shifting focus to you know tackle that so that's just one way of handling it But that's one one one important thing is just assume that your budget of money is something that you shouldn't Plan out with 12 months assuming you have great fidelity But plan out for 90 days when you actually have a much stronger sense of what you're going to be prioritizing So it's yeah, I mean I like this idea where there's it's starting to provide shape I liked your it's a roadmap not in the sense of I'm here today, and I want to get the ball tomorrow There's a clear path. I just got to think what's in the way. It's more like There's this whole the system that has to get wrapped around it There's this portfolio piece that comes in and then when what I like about it is When you're pivoting, you know, you're making a pivot you're not just spinning endlessly, right? Because a lot of times you could see something new come in and if you really don't know how to absorb it in that moment It's not a pivot. It's a spin, and it's a I hope we land okay where you could say I actually know I'm gonna have to take some money out of this piece of the budget or I'm gonna have to divert this so much This amount of staff time to take care of this and know what I'm taking it away from In a much more clear way, but with that in mind who Who knows who's taking what away from what you know, where does this start? Where does something like this live within an organization? We often Talk it I might have written about it where you know the communication side in a non-profit or these are the marketing side Because they have access to all these tools and this is what we're talking about right? We're talking about Markham technology here Markham stacks, but it shouldn't just be the communications team That's responsible or just the fundraising team just because they have access to the data to have it something like this come about How how have we implemented this who have we talked to why were we brought in? Give us some advice Nate. Sure. Sure. So that's a really great point I mean, I guess you know the best place for the roadmap to work as a you know Both the tool and a sort of document or an artifact is at the executive team level because in essence what you're talking about our business priorities matched up to Return on investment or business value generated, you know and those business values that are generated are rarely in just a single department and The business objectives often require multi-departmental cooperation, you know, I mean it's a simple example might be You might fund people who do research and actually figure out how things should change in the world You might actually, you know Have staff who are communicating to the public and to media organizations on what that research is and then you may have Donors who are particularly interested in like how that research Is changing the world and what your research focuses and what you as an organization need to get to the next level of you know Social impact or research or whatever it is and each three each of those are sort of a part of the puzzle And they're all in theory connected through You know a cohesive set of processes and technology But we know that departmental boundaries often mean that those processes and technology choices stop at the departmental boundaries And so what roadmaps can help you do is elevate those needs up to the right level to the executive team level where the Integrations and the cooperations and the shared vision on how business process should work Can all be hammered out with the objective of each department actually getting what it needs More efficiently and at a higher quality level. So even though benefits each of the departments None of the departments can actually create the value they need without the help of others And that's kind of why it's sort of an executive level You know activity, you know and for most of our clients we find that you know It works best when we're either working at the the C-suite level or with what an executive steering committee that's Has somebody who reports or is actively involved at the C-suite level as a sponsor of it And I think those are the sort of two areas where it's the most valuable It can be valuable for a communication team to go and point out to the rest of the organization You know where this quadruple should be valuable and to kind of help elevate those problems up to the right level So it can also be a way to surface these needs, you know, it doesn't but that doesn't mean it'll be executed Right like the roadmap can be sort of two purposes It can be a plan of execution or it can be a strategy document that says hey How can we make this roadmap something we could enable, you know, it could be aspirational instead of just the actionable document So on the enablement side, I mean once it's made I see yeah, definitely the value that you need some Integrating force between all of the competing demands Someone who could be objective whether that's internal or an external group like us who comes in and helps Take that strategy to still it down into all the pieces But then when it comes to enablement is it does it go back to each? Department, you know, who who or how do things start to happen once you have the roadmap in place? Yeah, so I think that the roadmap You know benefits from you know clear Sent clear declarations of who's owning what you know, and I think some of those items Well, every technology piece will be owned by one department You know the executive team never owns like you know technical infrastructure or things like that, you know But some of those some of those tools may be cross-departmental in their need But they need a sponsor who's sort of owning and coordinating them and a good example is CRM, you know, and many organizations CRM is Mostly most prioritized to those who you know manage financial donations or inbound payments or any kind of financial piece of the puzzle and those Relationships are critical, you know, and so they sort of own the CRM But you know what we're finding is of course all the other areas of outreach and user engagement or audience engagement play into that You know, you know an initial donor doesn't show up being highly engaged in high with high affinity of your organization That's built over time through a variety of relationship building mechanisms And so there are a lot of other people who need and have inputs that could be valuable to eventually building a good donor relationship That are not in the donor Division or not part of that business unit and so, you know, that's a long way of saying that I think The roadmap helps identify which business partners need to collaborate with which others But also who ultimately is the person who's the decider of those But with the goal of having that reported up to the executive team in a collaborative way versus a stove piped way So it's not, you know The CRM is a hundred percent set up for the donor team and that success It's more like the donor team is all set and we have these three other areas that need to be developed from like say You know stage one maturity to stage three maturity in order to actually achieve our business goals And you know, that's another thing I just might mention is that a lot of these things are not binary It's not working or not working. It's about how sophisticated and how mature your use of those systems are, you know Like you can have a one-page website and that's that's stage zero or stage one Maybe you know broadcast maturity we're gonna have a very, you know sophisticated website that personalizes content that builds Relationships and kind of helps do a lot of the connection building between you and an audience member before anyone on your staff Does any you know in person work with that person and you know, those are two ends of the spectrum Yeah, it was something you said a little bit back to which is The cooperation that goes into and who has to talk to whom I'm using that English, right? I don't know I was never good at grammar but We see I mean, it's just the internal dynamics within organizations when there are leaders across, right? And maybe this really helps to become if you think so. I mean like a change management Sort of tool and vehicle where I heard what Nate needs. I've listened to the needs. Chowney's department had needs to I Wanted staff. I want a more budget. I need a certain tool But at least if we captured them all instead of who's more Important today in this current budget as the team everybody can sort of have a say and weigh it out You still might not like the outcome because you might be slated to go after someone else's but then it feels like At least it's still captured and there's purpose of how it's going to flow through the organization So I mean is this road mapping or portfolio management technical architecture, whatever. We're still talking about here Do what's your thought? I mean do you think it actually could be an effective change management vehicle? I mean really helping groups rally around at least have that sort of single vision and as a communications out to the Organization, this is why we're doing what we're doing Yeah, I think that's great potential for that and you know, we've seen it used like that within some of the organizations You know on the most simple version of that organizations ensure that things like Training onboarding sunsetting plans, you know Enablement of new tools coming online are included in the road map So that those kind of important change management pieces are Scheduled and planned and you know publicized everyone that those are both good to have happened and need to have happened So that's kind of the very basic version of it, but then there are sort of wider pieces as well, which are things like Understanding which jobs in an organization might be best to shared services versus being part of a department specifically And CRM is another good example of this right where many departments may need to You know manage contact records and want to move data in and out of the CRM And you know you want to keep everything clean But typically the CRM job function is whoever had the biggest budget to buy the CRM They hire a CRM expert and then they kind of have that person on their department And they're kind of ad hocly loaned out or maybe occasionally a department head will make a deal with another department head for a couple years To fund a position jointly, but it's very brittle, right? It's just when there's two department heads or one of them leaves that position potentially is in jeopardy If it's shared budget between two departments and so, you know from a change management a staffing perspective as well There's a ton of possibility with these red maps to understand Which things you might want to enable your in whole organization to be able to do and not stove pipe that resource within one department Which has you know only is you know some of the priorities of the organization Yeah, that's really interesting way to think about it, you know like how what's how do we if that system is critical for cross-functional success of the organization Make sure you staffed accordingly because even the person if you built it around a person skill set that person leaves You still need that skill set so having that having that definition really clearly put out there probably makes That turnover much more easier to absorb, you know, I've I've seen it for groups I've worked with and I think I was one of those people too right where I left and then I was getting moonlighting calls on nights and weekends because I was the only person who knew how to do a system I was much younger in my career. So slight shame on me, but I you know it was much faster in the late 90s early 2000s. We just didn't think about it back then But I still see that happening now where Oh, yeah, there's a little too much of that So road mapping seems to be a way to it doesn't necessarily address somebody leaving organization But I think it helps sounds like it could help address the gap of when they leave We need to hire it needs to be the skill set. This is where they sit and report Rather than debating where the headcount should reside Yeah, and I'd say Related to that's another interesting kind of trend we see which is that, you know Communications functions used to be like very separate from what the rest of the organization did And that one of the interesting pressures on comms teams now is that Part of the comms team is really a shared service for the organization and part of it is the traditional separated focused comms function But and that's one of the challenges that comms teams find is that they're really doing a lot of enablement for other parts of the organization unofficially and you know in a You know more bright future they might actually split that department into like a shared You know communications enablement function for the organization and then the organizational official communications being a separate piece of that Who uses that service because you know, we see this all the time that you know, donor management needs the same stuff you know, uh venue management running events like, uh I mean just almost every part of the organization has outreach and communications and mark You know mark tech kind of problems and things now and normally it's the comms team that's trying to enable those But the problem is the way that they're structured. They can't Actually help change the business processes or create any kind of enforcement in those other departments You know, and if they do it's seen as a land grab or you know Struggle between the communications department the other departments Whereas there was a shared service So just be the way the shared service worked and all of the departments would equally work with it and be either happy Or dissatisfied with how that department worked, but it would put the right kind of shared pressure on that shared service Um, and also the staffing will be easier, right? Like if five departments need in essence one and a half designers That's much easier for that shared service to staff than it is for the comms team to have an extra capacity of One and a half designers that aren't doing comm stuff the rest of the time. So Hmm Hmm. So are you is this a slight argument? I mean, we might be getting tangential. So I might have to rain it back but for almost a new Division within organizations Yeah, I would say so. I mean, I think just like organizations used to have it departments Where you go and get your laptop get fixed and make sure that you know, your department's like internet was working and whatnot You know, there's kind of like a mark tech department that you know Many organizations have in essence, even if it's not officially named that where you know, like oh help us build twitter cards for a thing Or we want to put our report online or you know, we have a new product launching Can you help put together a little campaign package for that? You know, and you know, and if you're a product company has one or two products Then your comms team just does that, right? but if you're a diversified or complex organization Then your comms team has got other things on their plate and this is just one more thing Which really should go to a you know shared services not for the organizational comms You're managing your brand and worrying about press releases and all sorts of other stuff, you know I do know. Yeah, I've been thinking about that for a while now where there's it's it almost feels like communications Departments need to get back to doing communications work You know that the outreach the PR the writing the the setup to managing the brand identity and then there is this other Unit and it just never feels right because I You think back to the early 2000s, right when content management systems were all the rage as they were coming out But it's you know, it was well it shouldn't sit on it Maybe it sits in the communications But it was always this like is it it your comms and now you see it being is it comms for these Is it comms or fundraising is it comms or the program even right or is it comms or this? Yeah, it's really interesting to think about that model If you had that internally where these systems Based up having this roadmap you get clarity of well this one. Let's start bringing this in house We can support this other one at a different type of budget We need these types of skills this type of reporting this type of data structure And it's not You know, I think when we talk about road mapping it we're not talking about technical road mapping that you should be using VoIP phones Right, we really are talking to groups about mar marketing communications technologies And so it does feel right to be out of it, right? Because the it department serves a very different function, you know Hardening the security of the organization making sure the machines work making sure you can get your job done It's very different than Do I have the right experience design on the website? So when somebody signs up I can get to the right type of segmentation level for the marketing automation Correctly And I can record all that in the data report Exactly or which of these three Technically equivalent WordPress vendors is actually the best one to work with our kind of team based on the Venn diagram of how technical Versus strategy oriented our comms team is or whatnot, right? Like there's a whole set of skills there that are very focused on mar tech technologies You know, and I think if you look at every comms team They really do have a like a Venn diagram over the comms team you could draw Which is like how technical are they and and how process oriented are they and how communication strategy oriented? They are and like the overlap of those is really different organization organization You know, we run into some comms teams. They're basically just it teams for mar tech You know, all they're doing is keeping all the tech running for communications Then we find the other extreme as well where like they have really deep You know media connections and they may be former reporters and they really know what's up But they have a really limited ability to deploy and take advantage of a lot of the new technology pieces Um, you know in either case the organization is struggling because they really need the perfect kind of three dots with that And one easy way to solve that is to move one of those diagrams off, you know One of the circles in the diagram off to another department So I wonder if one of our Woes and trying to really as we you know, we've done this work I think for us, it's how do we market it and how do we really describe it and it's I think it is tough because this does really You know, if you if you did a road mapping with us and you did it right and all these pieces we talk about start to a line up I mean, it's more than technology or that means you're staffing, right? This really becomes management consulting at some level to give you A capability and something that everybody can look at equally See where the parts need to flow. What's working and what isn't and then you could even see how things start to extrapolate out from there Um and they get the budget case study. I just remember So often when I was in house and it'd be like, okay, it's budget time But and it would be like, you know, eight months before the end of the fiscal year and I'd be like, I don't know what I finished Or what I needed the budget for Where if you if you actually had thought about it if I if I had at the time something like this tool like this I could have been like, hey, well, I know I'm tracking towards this. I think I'm still gonna need You know budget for this and even potential headcount next year Can I can I write in for headcount because we used to have to request You know if you were going to get if you wanted more staff and then you would at least exactly know where it went You know, I remember a one client of ours that we helped with this their thing was and I imagine there's others out there that have this opportunistic funding And hey, I got this I got this foundation online. I got a grant for x. What can we do? Or what do we want right and if it's almost like I know in that case it really was Hey, we want this because we want to know how to cumulatively fun and what to do next instead of scrambling every time A funder wants to give us money. We can be very clear about it say. Hey, we're building on to this piece We know why these are the results Help us or not and be fast and efficient right in that ask Yeah, so I mean I don't have you got more thoughts for us on this. We could probably keep ripping but Have we thought about a name since we've been talking about it terms of staff in opportunistic funding one of the things the road mapping can really help with is Planning for how you will maintain something that's opportunistically added as a capability so one of the big no-nos that we see and road mapping can help you avoid this is to hire a Required support person through the opportunistic funding that then you can't fund after the opportunistic funding is over And then having the capability that the funding brought to your organization You know become fallow or unusable because you don't have the person to kind of turn the crank to keep that function running And if you have road mapping you can even go to a funder and say if you help us enable the scalability This is the staff and here's how we're going to handle The maintenance and running of it after the funding is over which I think is more and more important for funders You know that they want to see you know But data about the impact of their funding But also they want to make sure that it wasn't a flash in the pan and you know I think without road mapping that becomes a little tougher right you can because You can say you're going to do that You can't prove it out where the road map gives some structure and some sort of documentation to that Yeah, that's a fantastic point. I mean, I'm just going to tag into with especially on the budgeting piece I mean, I can't tell you You and I combined right probably thousands of websites. We've built and been a part of over 20 years each. Yeah, but I mean out of those thousands 5% have ever been like, oh, yeah, of course we have an ongoing budget for this because it's not a one-time thing That's just done You know and that's just one piece where it's like man, you you've taken the time you prioritize it You've acquired this technology. You may even put staff towards it, but then you had no budget To do anything with the software going forward That's like, yeah, I mean that feels like another piece to your point, right? It's it's you need staff to maintain it and I think it hopefully a roadmap would really show that Yeah, I think so well, there's all good inception on you one more thing So, you know, we we also deal a lot with organizations that are have rebuilding a website They just built three or four years ago and we're pretty sure and three or four years are going to be rebuilding the one We built them, you know And you know, one of the things that always comes up there is that people don't think what are we trying to solve? Organizationally more permanently with this web build. It's almost always a branding exercise or you know We want the current strategy of the organization reflected in the website But they don't do things like think this is the day or this is the web build where we fix the data model So that the next website that you know import and export of content It's so much easier because we really figured out the data model on this one Or this is the one we really start managing an organizational taxonomy really, you know Dedicatedly so that the next time we do this we know where to put all the different content And we have it all organized or we're ready for machine learning or you know Artificial intelligence to tag on to that taxonomy and I think if people thought about The iterative big investments they're going to make as an organization over 10 or 15 years The roadmap can really help you figure out what the big win is to kind of knock off the things that make these so expensive And so difficult for words, you know and you know the data modeling and the taxonomy pieces are just two that Are definitely cardinal sins in the web world, you know where people just do not figure those out and build on them project to project and It continues to cause enormous costs for for all those organizations I mean, I didn't coin it but there's the you know Where a small business, you know this we started it together, but there's you know survive What is surviving maintaining and then thriving? I think something else that rhymes in the middle that i'm probably not getting right, but I wonder then It almost seems to get to that top maturity level to thriving place I think what you said was really important there, which is yeah start thinking of yourself as a 10 to 15 year organization Not this year's annual budget Right because if if you're really in it for the long haul, you know, we're taking on Global poverty in certain, you know developing countries You know for a fact you're not going to achieve it in one year You know, you do want to achieve it you want to have aims But why not go big for the 10 to 15 year and say yeah I mean we should be getting there even if you if you solved it before then or you just don't get there But then have that outlook I think that's really important too just because of you know to have That mentality to go into the roadmap That kind of fidelity you can get from one to three years because what we're also seeing Is just the change in the funding landscape where it's looking more to me in the conversations I have where it's like impact investment Rather than this little donation that little donation and I could see if you're If you're kind of getting the small dollars and you're trying to live off that churn Yeah, okay, maybe i'm not a 10 to 15 year old But then you turn around and maybe you really hit something and now you got groups dropping, you know Hey, I got 10 million I got 20. I got a hundred What can you do if if you've got a 15 year mentality you're like, of course. Yeah, I'm just totally I'm gonna roll it in Well, and I think it you know it changes it from being like Small incremental improvements to your org to thinking about thresholds where your org would really change how it does business You know, I think if let's take outreach, right? Like let's say you're an organization and you reach a hundred thousand people And you say over 10 years we want to be the kind of organization that now reaches 5 million people And let's say you take that approach and then you reach a threshold of two and a half million people And now you maybe have the capability to actually do things like Organize events that have 40 or 50 thousand people come to them, you know Where when you're a hundred thousand person organization that sounded crazy You're gonna get 50 percent of everybody to come to something, you know And I think that really changes how organizations can plan and advance their mission if they Think about these thresholds they're trying to drive towards over a longer period And you know, that's that's pretty grand, but even in the web space that could make a lot of sense Like, you know, what's the workload that you want your web technologies to take off your staff, you know When will you reach that? You know, when will it be that you know the website handles The initial description and onboarding of people who are interested in your cause to your organization Right, like let's talk about that as a 10-year goal, you know, I heard that man. I heard it all the time My my thing has always been I mean technology is a tool that's supposed to be making your life easier You're not supposed to be serving the technology that you just purchased to come in, right? It's really supposed to be opposite You should be like flying through your work and getting even more done because this new piece of technology is taking care of something Oh, totally. Well, I think that's a that's a mental metaphor that you know We often I mean it's a little different road map You know throughout here a lot of people want their technology to be like a sports car Where they get in there and they can fling it around and you know The wheel gives them instant responsiveness and it feels really tailored to them and it's great And I mean that's kind of fun for the driver But it actually is much more risky for your organization, right? Like that sports car is a lot more likely to get wrapped up around a You know a telephone pole then an automated safe driving car would be you know And I think technology is kind of like that right especially, you know CRM and web builds and things like that where What people should be focused on is how can we make something work for us as opposed to How can I make it have all of the levers at my disposal, you know And I think road mapping can help a little bit with that too because it puts pressures on things like Staff time dedicated to something or volume of work produced by person or you know productivity of a department overall and those kind of road mapping goals can kind of change the incentive system inside departments, which is useful too Well, it feels like it could add to the value conversation Like don't talk to me about the tool talking me about what i'm going to be doing differently as an organization And what the value impact is towards my strategic goal Where and that road mapping conversation or documentation that comes out that everybody weighs in it almost becomes a check and balance With the organization against somebody going out and getting a nice sports car Yeah, yeah, well, you know, I struggle with the name a lot, you know, we read the name thing Because like, you know, this all ties into that right like ironically I think the name that appeals to me is dynamic steering which is a concept that comes out of holocracy Which is you know, sort of less hierarchical way of running a business more group oriented You and I have talked a lot about i've been really interested in it for a number of years But you know the idea of dynamic steering is that you need to make lots of small force corrections to actually reach a long term Goal because if you just drove in a straight line towards your goal Any little thing that moves you off course is going to move you really far from your goal The longer you keep going off that slightly uncorrected path And you know, what a road map or a road mapping experience really is Is a framework and set up to both if I figure out that long term goal in a useful way And then create the dynamic steering You know processes and structures you need and metrics you need in order to keep Realigning yourself to continue to be aimed to the right goal, you know And that's really the the trick about road mapping is that you can't You can't build it and then just keep driving that way You're not going to get there, you know, you have to use it as a framework in a business process to keep getting there Yeah, I mean as you were saying that I was even thinking just about That becomes almost a bottom up fed in but it's executives that are signing off and reviewing it But then they have to go to their pool bird And then you can almost get the pseudo alignment to know when you're steering and shifting because I think there's To me it still feels like there's this fallacy Especially when it comes to forward reporting that yep, everything's great It's like at the straight line that just goes up and we all know the world doesn't work that way Right, it's it's messy and it curves and you run into walls and you bump and And you lose things and you know some of the places I've worked to be so much pressure to not Get something right that you would either just not do anything you wouldn't move forward And it was there's I almost feel like if you have the roadmap or even like the data strategy But like learn from the thing that didn't go right don't do it again Yeah, I mean, you know your failure is a map as they say, you know, I think it's really true You know, like, you know, it's science isn't built on successful experiments It's built on experiments that disprove something, you know, and it's not a good experiment if it can't be disproved, you know and I think that The same thing is true in this kind of planning right like the best organizations are making bold Experimental guesses and then being very accurate in measuring them and changing direction based off of what they learn And you know, if you look at all of the most successful internet companies, they're all doing that You know and to a greater or a lesser extent or more or less irritating their customers, you know But sort of facebook famously, you know used to roll out a new interface to 10 of their audience Which is like a billion people and see how it went and then if that went well They do it to another 10 and then they keep rolling it out till everyone got the thing But they've continually be optimizing and you know, google does the same thing and etsy was doing that for a long time But you know this idea of like we got to try it We got to see how it works in the real world and when it doesn't work we retrench and when it does work we keep going but you know That's kind of expected like it's planned into the behavior that you're going to run it and see what to do next Not that you're going to do it and it was such a great success And if it wasn't you got to kind of bury it under the hood and keep on, you know pretending it was great So yeah, I think this really ties and speaks volumes of that. I mean it's two things, right? You're not just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks you're going out with plan And then yeah, if it doesn't work, you can shift and that's that's okay. You know why you're shifting And I think both of those things are important And this goes like that change management piece, which is I think um, you know red maps often do not get to this level detail but they can include things like A pilot program or an experimental period as part of the plan And I think that's something that would be really helpful just for organizations to to put on paper and look at and acknowledge Right, which is that nobody knows how it's going to work, right? Like you can have really strong insights and you can be an expert in that area But we all need to you know, see what the real world effects of these things are And I think that you know road mapping can at least help put that in front of executives and other people more clearly and say Yeah, we think we're doing the right thing here But guess what you don't want us to keep doing the wrong thing and we have a plan for if we find out it's the wrong thing, you know Digging it. So okay road map Talks about technology change management communicate internal communications Feels like it solves a lot of things, but does this road map the right encompassing word? Yeah, you know I've been messing around the sort of stock metaphors because I really feel like those are a little bit more apropos You know the idea of a portfolio and how you're invested in the portfolio and how the portfolio is returning on that investment And how the in fact that you you you can kind of long term invest and that's not a bad plan But you often do need to kind of move in and out of different investments, you know To kind of maximize the performance of the portfolio I think that's that feels more right to me is the right kind of metaphor Because it really is about making big bets having long-term goals and then staying the course But course correcting, you know in minor ways towards that successful outcome, you know You know different from day trading, I guess, you know Well, yeah, I mean that's what I was thinking. I mean I had that post I wrote a little while ago Which was don't manage single prod a string of projects, right manage portfolio understand how they're all coming together Because yeah, it's the same thing, right? You're not going to manage each stock individually You want to look at the whole broad scope of it? Yeah, maybe maybe we're coming to portfolio management Yeah, I think yeah portfolio management is is pretty close I mean the other idea of the portfolio that's appealing is that it's it's sort of implies that it's more than one department And it's you know, sort of cross organization, you know, and it's the organization's investment in that portfolio And you know, certainly departments can manage things and be expert advisors in different stocks So to speak to kind of keep the metaphor even further But really it's the organizational budget that's being invested to some extent, right? So Yeah, I mean we've been talking With the transformation change management work we do about the integrator role You know in these organizations who sits between it. So maybe there's something with integration here too Um, but yeah, I don't know any final thoughts. Maybe we can close up and turn it over to the audience and see if they've got some comments for us Yeah, that sounds great. This has been fun. I mean, yeah, I can certainly talk about this for hours more This is a he has something very passionate on your dear to my heart, but this has been great Yeah, thank you for for convening us here, Tony. It's lovely to talk to you Well, I hope everyone out there in the audience if you could like this if this is resonating with you Give us some comments questions below, you know like share spread the word Spread the word like cream cheese on a bagel like my wife likes to say Uh, we we'd love the we love the attention. We love talking to people So, you know, please feel free to reach out to us and if you do have You've come up with a great name that you think we could use to package this Please let us know drop it in the comments or hit us up on linkedin or off the website And we'd be happy to talk with you and until next time Thanks y'all. Cheers