Use an Outcome-Based Roadmap for Scalable Growth

In Seeking Growth, Young SaaS Companies Often Find Complexity

It’s not unusual for an early-stage SaaS company in pursuit of revenue growth to temporarily de-emphasize product-market fit and create a customer-specific customization to its solution.

While this approach might deliver information that informs product-market fit, it more often results in obstacles that make it more difficult to predictably and scalably grow revenue.

What impacts occur due to a variety of solution customizations?

• Marketing messaging is diluted and ineffective
• Sales teams are unable to confidently and concisely describe the key problem solved by the solution
• Processes, such as customer onboarding, are difficult to predictably deliver and scale
• Success criteria for customers is varied and frequently requires product adjustments or enhancements to achieve

When a business knows it needs to narrow its focus in order to best serve current and future customers, where does it start? It must align its product roadmap to desired customer outcomes. Here, we’ll explain how an outcome-based roadmap can achieve exactly that.

An Example of an Outcome-Based Roadmap

Carema Consulting’s Outcome Framework brings a disciplined approach to evaluating and prioritizing desired customer outcomes. Going through an exercise like this helps set up customers to gain the most value from your product and also helps customers identify how their desired outcomes align to product capabilities.

Use the Outcome Framework to Identify Product Opportunities and Gaps

In the example above, a customer of an HRtech solution can easily identify the four different business outcomes — captured within the column headers — it can realize via the HRtech software.

The Outcome Framework is informed by inputs and feedback gleaned from customer interviews, thus avoiding influence from biased internal perceptions and company lore.

For a product team, this outcome-based roadmap framework provides immense value because it paints a clear and market-validated picture of the business results a customer achieves from the company’s solution. It also gives product teams the ability to methodically evaluate and prioritize enhancements around outcomes that customers value and are willingly to pay for.

As a result, the product, associated processes, marketing messages, and sales materials become more focused and scalable.

A Company Aligned Around Scalable Customer Outcomes

With the Outcome Framework in hand, companies can align the entire organization around its customers’ desired outcomes:

• Product teams are equipped with customer-driven insights to prioritize improvements tied to top customer outcomes
• Customer success and implementation teams are able to build scalable processes that help customers consistently achieve their goals
• Marketing teams can create targeted, focused messaging to fill the pipeline with qualified leads that sales is well-equipped to close

Aligned around the Outcome Framework, companies can take the first step toward achieving predictable, scalable revenue growth.

Start Your Scalable Journey with Carema Consulting

If the outcome-based roadmap framework explored in this post would be beneficial to your organization (and we’re confident it will), our team is ready to connect with you to learn more about your growth strategy and how we can use this solution to help you achieve lasting success. Get in touch with us today to get started.