Checklist
Five questions before approving a technology roadmap
By Suman Saha
A technology roadmap usually arrives as a set of slides and a budget request. Before approving it, five questions will tell you whether the plan is ready to fund, or whether it needs more work first. None require technical expertise. They require clear answers.
What business outcome will change, and how will we know?
A roadmap is a set of bets. Each item should name the business result it is meant to move: revenue, cost, cycle time, customer experience, risk exposure, or capacity for growth. "Modernize the platform" is an activity. "Cut the time to launch a new product line from months to weeks" is an outcome.
If the team cannot say what will be different for the business when the work is done, the item is not ready for approval.
What is the baseline today?
Without a starting point, progress cannot be shown and claims of improvement cannot be tested. Ask what the current cost, performance, reliability, or delivery speed actually is, and where those numbers come from.
If the baseline is unknown, the first step of the roadmap may simply be to establish it. That is a legitimate and often inexpensive step.
Who is accountable for the result?
Shared ownership often means no ownership. Each outcome needs one named leader who is accountable for the result, with the authority to make tradeoffs and the time to do it.
Separate accountability for the business result from responsibility for delivery tasks. Both matter, and they are often different people.
What does delivery depend on?
Most roadmaps fail at the seams: a vendor contract that is not signed, a data set that is not ready, a team already committed elsewhere, a security review that takes longer than planned.
Ask for the dependencies to be written down, with an owner and a date for each. The critical few should be visible to the executive team, not buried in a project plan.
What evidence supports the investment?
Approval should rest on evidence you can examine: costs that have been estimated, assumptions that have been stated, and risks that have been named. Where evidence is thin, the honest answer may be to fund a smaller first step that produces it.
Look for clear decision points. A good roadmap shows where you will stop, adjust, or continue based on what you learn.
Roadmap approval checklist
1. What business outcome will change, and how will we know?
- Each major item names a business outcome, not just an activity
- There is a measure for each outcome and a date to check it
2. What is the baseline today?
- Current figures exist for the measures that matter
- The source of each figure is known and can be repeated
3. Who is accountable for the result?
- One named leader owns each outcome
- That leader has the authority and time to make tradeoffs
4. What does delivery depend on?
- Key dependencies are listed with owners and dates
- Capacity of the people who will do the work has been confirmed
5. What evidence supports the investment?
- Costs and key assumptions are written down
- There are defined points to stop, adjust, or continue
If several boxes stay empty, that is useful information. It usually means the next step is a short, focused piece of work to fill the gaps before committing the full budget.