Alex Burnham & Simone Busch | Customer Strategy & Success 

When explorers navigate complex terrain with limited information, they’ll be confronted with unexpected challenges and led down dead-ends.  

Underestimating the harsh environment and distance to their destination, Spanish conquistadors encountered disaster in their attempt to colonize what is now Florida. Odysseus spent a grueling decade overcoming unexpected obstacles and swings in fortune before finally making it back home. 

Not as dramatic but equally important, businesses must navigate their own environment of market and customer changes, industry complexities, and technological upheavals. 

The absence of a reliable roadmap abandons brands and retailers to the choppy seas of uncertainty and inefficiency; susceptible to drifting on costly detours and losing sight of opportunities. As Seneca said, if we don’t know which port we’re sailing to, no wind is favorable. With no clear vision, we’re just aimlessly floating; moving but going nowhere. 

To avoid a digital commerce odyssey, a well-defined and dynamic roadmap helps to guide businesses with clear strategies and actionable steps, avoid pitfalls, and achieve long-term goals.

Roadmap prioritization

While consumer confidence is slowly climbing from its post-Covid depths, from the UK and US to Australia, and with inflation decelerating, hesitancy remains. Businesses are continuing to navigate the challenges of an uncertain economic landscape. 

It has led businesses to revisit their roadmaps, refining and re-prioritizing their digital commerce goals to deliver the best results. The ability to adapt and innovate is key. 

But how can businesses prioritize their roadmaps to ensure they’re on the right path to growth? And what does this process involve? 

As part of the Tryzens Global Customer Success team, we work with our clients to analyze their unique challenges and opportunities, which informs the development of tailored, strategic roadmaps. These roadmaps will then prioritize digital commerce goals to ensure sustainable growth in an ever-evolving market. 

Here are the base foundations that we look at when it comes to roadmap prioritization. 

The level of effort involved 

Every item on your digital commerce roadmap requires a different level of effort. This can range from subtle CX tweaks to major platform overhauls. Understanding the effort involved in each task is crucial for effective roadmap prioritization.  

Smaller efforts, such as SEO adjustments or front-end tweaks can often yield quick wins: low-hanging fruit from which you taste immediate benefits. On the other hand, larger efforts like overhauling your payment system or launching in a new country will require more resources and offer more significant long-term gains.

The KPIs 

Key performance indicators (KPIs) play a pivotal role in determining the success of your digital commerce initiatives. From the conversion rate, cart abandonment rate, and customer retention to return on ad spend, average order value, and customer lifetime value – each change or update to your roadmap needs to be aligned with specific KPIs that are measurable and impactful.  

With your KPIs identified, we then work with clients to prioritize them, creating a clear hierarchy of tasks that are set up to align with business objectives.

Your budget

Understanding your budget for the current financial year is critical when planning your digital commerce roadmap. Not all initiatives can be run at the same time. Budget constraints often dictate the size and scope of certain projects, although other variables are at play here, such as risks and dependencies across projects that determine which initiatives can run concurrently. 

By aligning your roadmap with your budget, you can ensure that you are making the most effective use of available resources. This approach helps to avoid over-commitment and ensures that critical projects receive the necessary funding.

The long-term goals

While short-term wins are important, keep a constant eye on the long-term business goals. Some parts of your roadmap are likely to be key for future projects even if they don’t offer immediate benefits. For example, getting an OMS up and running before expanding into new markets so that your operations can scale efficiently and handle increased order volumes. Or implementing a CDP to centralize customer data before developing an effective loyalty program. 

Tryzens Global works with clients to future-proof digital commerce strategies. By baking specific solutions into their digital architecture, they can turn on the right functionality when the time comes. This also helps client teams get used to the technology or platform in advance prior to rolling it out. 

Once we have laid the groundwork for the roadmap, we can then move onto 4 key areas: return on investment, quick wins, dependencies, and resource profiles.

Evaluating return on investment (ROI)

ROI is a critical factor in roadmap prioritization. By evaluating which tasks will yield the highest return on investment, you can ensure that your efforts are focused on the most impactful initiatives. This may be a small task that leads to higher traffic on the site, or it could be a large task to increase the website’s conversion rate – which would be more of a revenue generating task than the former task.  

Balancing these considerations ensures that you’re not only achieving quick wins but also investing in sustainable, long-term tasks.

Identifying quick wins 

Is there a subset of the roadmap that we could be addressing upfront while we refine the bigger items? Even if they aren’t the highest money earners, quick wins help to drive immediate improvements.  

This could be anything from improving SEO to addressing issues that are increasing the team’s overheads, such as data export, which they must manually fix every time. Or tackling existing challenges that users are experiencing on the site that may be causing a lower-than-expected conversion rate. 

Quick wins help build momentum and provide immediate benefits, allowing you to focus on refining larger items in your roadmap. 

Managing dependencies 

Dependencies are a crucial consideration in roadmap prioritization. When looking at the bigger projects, you will often find that making a change to one system will have an impact on another. This makes the order in which you tackle items key; don’t go through the process of enabling Apply Pay, for example, if you’re set to change your payment service provider (PSP) later this year. 

Similarly, if a future project is dependent on a new solution being in place, then that forces an urgency with which we’ll need to tackle the implementation of the new solution. Understanding these dependencies helps in sequencing your tasks effectively, ensuring smooth transitions and minimal disruptions.

Assessing resource profiles 

The availability of resources can significantly impact your roadmap. Some teams work extremely leanly, and therefore can’t handle multiple projects simultaneously. If they do, they won’t have the right members in place (whether in number or necessary skills) to make the project a success.

For example, a client may want to implement headless architecture, with a view to manage regular frontend enhancements in the future. Yet they don’t currently have the in-house team or capabilities to do that. The timeline the client has for upskilling or upscaling will determine how quickly we can begin working on that project.

Collaborative workshops and tools 

We believe in the power of collaboration to refine and prioritize roadmaps effectively. Our ICE workshops, whether in-person or virtual using Planning Poker, ensure that every stakeholder’s voice is heard (we’re fans of the old-school sticky-note method) before going down the proven measurement framework process). 

Using digital tools like Miro, we create a holistic view of the project. This inclusive approach allows for comprehensive discussions and ensures that the final roadmap is well-rounded and strategically sound. 

A step-by-step guide to roadmap prioritization 

To help prioritize and clarify the distinction between multiple initiatives, we use a structured step-by-step guide: 

1. Initial session with our clients: Arrange a session with our clients, either onsite or remotely, at pre-determined intervals (quarterly or annually, depending on engagement level). 

2. Preliminary list of enhancements: Clients provide a preliminary list of enhancements for the defined period. 

3. Discussion and prioritization: Discuss the reasons behind each change, their priority, and the desired outcomes. 

4. Template completion: Build out a template based on the discussion outcomes, including planned delivery periods and reasons for changes. 

5. Review and adjustments: Raise any suggested areas of consideration during the discussion and include them in the roadmap template. 

6. Template sharing and execution: Share the completed template with the delivery team.  

Tryzens Global is a leader in global branded commerce. We help international brands optimize their digital commerce operations in new and existing markets. This includes roadmap prioritization, helping clients identify which ports provide the best destinations, using the winds of market and consumer trends to our advantage. 

If you’re looking for a digital commerce partner to help define a futureproof roadmap, one that aligns with your business goals, then contact Tryzens Global.