How To Build a Growth Roadmap; a Step-by-step Approach

At RevelX, we believe in the advantages that growth roadmaps bring. It worked wonders for one of our clients, the Dutch insurance company TVM verzekeringen. Today I want to describe a step-by-step approach to build a growth roadmap.

A growth roadmap is a document in which you delineate your strategy for growth in a well-organized way, taking into account your goals over time. There is not one specific form of a growth roadmap. Any form will do as long as you make tasks and goals transparent. At RevelX, we believe in the advantages that such roadmaps bring. It worked wonders for several of our clients.

You cannot build a decent growth roadmap without some preparations. There are a couple of issues to consider first:

• Everything starts with the vision for your product. Be short and concise. Elon Musk’s simple vision statement for Tesla is a great example: “To create the most compelling car company of the 21st century by driving the world’s transition to electric vehicles.” Are you able to describe your vision in such an elegant and self-explanatory way? If not, then you have to ask yourself why you want to offer your product in the first place.
• You also have to define your “North Star Metric.” As growth-hack guru Sean Ellis explained:

“The North Star Metric is the single metric that best captures the core value that your product delivers to customers. Optimizing your efforts to grow this metric is key to driving sustainable growth across your full customer base.”

How can you find your North Star Metric? Simple, you must understand the value that your most loyal customers get from using your product.

• Subsequently, determine which key performance indicators (KPIs) help you to reach your North Star Metric. Of course, this will depend on your proposition, but to give you some ideas to work with, I will mention some KPIs that you can apply: user acquisition, churn, retention, revenue, engagement, and monetization.

Congratulations! You have laid the groundwork for your growth roadmap. The real work can now begin! Because I want to keep it simple for now, let’s opt for theme-based roadmapping which has a low initial threshold. A theme-based roadmap is a diagram that consists of little cards. It can be built virtually or physically using Post-its or Trello cards. Below I will describe the next steps:

• Do you have a backlog of innovative ideas to try out? If not, it is time for an ideation session. If you do have some ideas, make a card for every single idea and divide them into themes. Ideas such as “add one-click ordering process” and “add PayPal” can be bundled into the theme “optimize the ordering process.”
• Determine the priorities for actions to be taken by sorting out the themes out into current, near-term and future actions.
• Implement the actions in order of priority. If some of the tactics work, double down on them. Cancel tactics that are not working. Keep adjusting your growth roadmap based on your experiences in the market.

At RevelX, we assisted TVM verzekeringen in building a growth roadmap. This Dutch insurance company specializes in the transportation industry. When defining the North Star Metric, we discovered that many independent truck drivers find it challenging to get all the paperwork and requirements in place to start driving.

As a result, we built a simple tool that truck drivers can use in order to check what paperwork they have to fill out, including what kind of insurance they need. This made their life easier and also converted them into clients for TVM.

Instead of building your own growth roadmap, you can also consider deploying the famous canvas methodology. At RevelX, we developed our own Growth Strategy Canvas. This tool is very easy to use. Don’t believe me? Download our Growth Strategy Canvas here, and you will be amazed at the insights it will bring you!