The reason software companies adopted agile practices was so that they could adapt their roadmaps to whatever they learned along the way.

If you learn something and do not change the roadmap, then there was no point to learning it. You might as well be doing a waterfall process. I think everyone accepts this. After all, waterfall is a myth. No one really thinks that the roadmap is set in stone.

But the business needs to plan. Marketing has events that need lead time to develop messages and material. Sales has prospects that want to know where the product is headed. Support, Training, and the Documentation team need time to get ready for new releases.

Some of this can be solved by developing support material alongside product development. For example, an embedded Product Marketing Manager can be closely following the trajectory of the roadmap and be developing messages at the same time. Even better, they can be helping to shape the roadmap from insights they get from their customer engagement.

The hard part is what to do with prospects. If you’re Apple, you never talk about what’s coming until you are ready to sell, but most of us can’t do that. Our prospects will certainly have unmet needs, and if you know you are actively working on them, it’s tough not to tell them. But, what should you say?

The truth is you don’t know the roadmap beyond the next few sprints. You are actively hoping that you learn something that will change it. New information is highly correlated with innovation.

But you are not changing your mission as easily. You know which customers you want to serve and what jobs of theirs you want to help with. So, talk about that and not the specific features you currently think will help. And talk about what you do know is coming (if you want). Even in a learning organization, the short-term roadmap should be pretty solid.

Product Development might not be able to commit to exact features, but they should commit to a learning plan, and that’s the roadmap that is safer to talk about.

If you wait to promote people who are “already doing the job”, I think you’ll find that you don’t retain your best people. And if you are hiring people into senior positions instead of promoting, you don’t deserve to.

Even if you do, it’s a kind of wage-theft to not pay people for the work they are doing. A few months is ok, a year is absolutely not if you have the positions. If you’ve already done this, consider a bonus at promotion time.

If you have the positions, but people don’t seem ready, that’s on you. You should have supported and developed them before they were needed. If the opportunity is there, you should take the chance and responsibility for their success.

Meaning, if it doesn’t work out, you were the failure. You failed to develop them in time, and you failed to support them so that they were successful.

I recently read The One Thing by Keller and Papasan. I recommend it, but the current VP of The ONE Thing was on an episode of Afford Anything, and it’s a very good introduction to the concept, if you want something quicker to digest.

The crux is that the authors ask you to focus on one question:

What’s the ONE Thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

In a “five-why” fashion, you could start with your big goals and work backwards until you have the very first thing you need to do. They recommend dedicating a huge chunk of your time to that one thing, accomplishing it, and then moving on to the next ONE thing … ONE thing at a time.

For example, you might start with a goal to “Lose 10 pounds”, but end up with a ONE Thing like — learn how to cook five healthy, low calorie density, one-pot, bulk meals.

Don’t stop there, though. They want you to keep going—what is the one thing that would make that easier? Maybe you can find a local chef to come to your house and make them with you for the first three weeks. Perhaps you can get four friends to each learn one and teach the others (or swap freezer bags each week).

When I finished the book, I thought that my current ONE thing was to build up the number of tutorials on App-o-Mat, so I have been doing that. The eventual goal with App-o-Mat is to sell some kind of product there, but before that I need an audience, and you can’t get an audience unless you have useful content.

But, I am supposed to keep digging.

What is the The ONE Thing I could do to make making tutorials on App-o-Mat easier. One thing that has helped is having Sprint-o-Mat, because I just take code out of it as a basis for the tutorial. If I didn’t have that, making the app might be important.

But, if I break it down to something like this: I want 100 more articles on App-o-Mat by the end of July, then I see that I can only write about 25 of them at my current pace. What would make that easier?

Obviously, more writers. But 75 articles would cost about $15,000. So, is the real next ONE thing to get $15,000 of revenue? Or at least $5,000 in May?

I’m still working through this. If App-o-Mat were a serious business, investing $15,000 would be a no-brainer, but honestly, it’s not. Right now, I want to have the experience of writing, and I don’t want to manage and edit a bunch of writers.

But, I do think that a trickle of articles by others would be ok, so I will explore that. I also think that if I doubled-down on the time I spend writing articles, I could do a lot more, which means dropping some other things or just getting more disciplined.

Keller would say to break down “getting more disciplined” first because he’s kind of annoying that way.

So, to do that, I am going to make my One thing to come up with article series ideas that could each have many articles in them. Because then, I’d at least have a checklist I could work from and could put them on a schedule. I think I’d see the possibility of outsourcing better as well.

Businesses adopt software for some rational reason. That reason is often expressed as a return on investment (ROI).

Based on the home pages of most software vendors, sales and marketing definitely know this. But based on the actual software, product development doesn’t seem to. Good software delivers ROI, but most don’t bother to tell you afterwards.

Decision makers in the organization care about this metric and will try to predict it before adoption and will probably track it afterwards.

And even if they don’t—if they were to magically know this metric, it would inform their decisions about renewal and increasing adoption. Sales and marketing lead with this info because they know that it’s a compelling selling strategy. They use ROI language in case-studies and may even have an ROI calculator on their site.

What I don’t see as often is an ROI calculator right in the software itself.

This is a huge missed opportunity. Lots of software has the exact data on how well it has achieved an ROI for you. That number is also a proxy for the ROI of the user that operates it or the decision maker that purchased it, so they would be very likely to want to share it.

SaaS products have a bigger advantage of not only knowing the ROI, but also being able to compare across customers and derive insights to why some customers are getting more benefit than others.

This information can drive account management calls, webinar topics, training, etc. Not to mention that the software could try to drive the user to those behaviors.

The model here to look at is Google Adwords. ROI literally drives the entire product UX and is reported on a line-item basis. It is deeply integrated into how you think of the product and adword metrics, PPC and CPC, have become common vocabulary in the industry.

So, what about your software? What is driving its value? Is that information readily available in the product itself? Does it drive user behavior? If not, how could it? Contact me if you want to talk more about this.

Most of my consulting proposals have options in them. I generally think that customers like having a choice in how to proceed, and it gives me a chance to express different ways I could help.

It’s hard not to have a preference for what they might pick. For example, you might want them to pick the most expensive option. I don’t always want that—sometimes an option is expensive because I don’t want to do it.

But, I find it best if I am neutral to their choice. I don’t want to be disappointed if my preferred option isn’t chosen.

In contrast, I want the customer to have a clear best choice. I don’t want them agonizing over the options, so they are usually pretty different. I might not know exactly which one they want, but it won’t be a close call.

For example, in an app proposal, one option might be to build the app. I don’t offer different ways I could do that, but I might offer to only be a project manager for an offshore team instead. Two very different options.

Each option is acceptable to me, but I think the customer would find choosing one easy.