Innovation Roadmapping Process

Too many opinions, not enough data?   Smart decisions aren’t made on guesswork. The best leaders turn to strategy to cut through the noise. "Good strategy starts with clear thinking and strong choices."   — Rita McGrath  Strategic thinking isn’t a luxury, it’s essential. It’s how you create clarity, drive impact, and make decisions that count.  Here are six frameworks top firms like BCG, Bain, and McKinsey use to excel: --- 1. Define Your Unique Value   Model: Porter’s Value Chain   - Step: Outline your core activities.   - Use it to: Focus on what sets you apart.  2. Analyze the Competitive Landscape   Model: BCG Growth-Share Matrix   - Step: Segment your products or services.   - Use it to: Invest in high-growth opportunities.  3. Prioritize Initiatives   Model: McKinsey’s 7-S Framework   - Step: Align strategy, structure, and systems.   - Use it to: Ensure every effort supports your strategic goals.  4. Develop a Clear Vision   Model: SWOT Analysis   - Step: Identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.   - Use it to: Create a clear, actionable vision.  5. Foster Innovation   Model: McKinsey’s Three Horizons   - Step: Balance short-term wins with long-term growth.   - Use it to: Drive both immediate results and future innovation.  6. Adapt and Evolve   Model: PEST Analysis   - Step: Examine political, economic, social, and technological factors.   - Use it to: Stay ahead of external changes. --- Why it matters:   Strategy isn’t about complexity—it’s about focus.   These frameworks help you filter out the noise and guide your team with confidence. "A well-crafted strategy is your roadmap to success."   — Michael Treacy  What’s your go-to strategy framework? Let’s discuss below.  If this resonated, share it with someone who’s tackling tough decisions.   Follow Jay Mount for more insights on leadership and strategic thinking.

6 frameworks to cut through AI noise. Leadership offsites are about choices: '𝘑𝘰𝘰𝘴𝘵, 𝘸𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘥𝘰 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘈𝘐.' '𝘎𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵. 𝘉𝘶𝘵 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘥𝘰 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘴𝘵? 𝘈𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘩𝘺?' That's the moment we need frameworks - not to complicate things, but to simplify the endless options into clear decisions. The 6 frameworks that proved most effective: 1. Map your AI opportunity landscape The AI Opportunities Radar gives teams a shared language. Is this a back-office efficiency play or a game-changing customer experience? Plot it visually and watch the strategic debates become productive. 2. Balance quick wins with transformation The 'low- and high-hanging fruit' framework. Leadership teams need early momentum (quick wins) AND meaningful transformation (big bets). I usually print use cases and let them map them on these straightforward axes. 3. Where will we create value with AI "We'll be 30% more productive with AI!" Really? How? The AI Value framework forces teams to articulate exactly where and how value will emerge - beyond the vague productivity promises. It also highlights the importance of thinking beyond just productivity. 4. Start with real problems, not shiny toys The classic Value Proposition Canvas grounds everything in reality. What jobs-to-be-done can we actually do with AI, and which pains are we solving for? It's key to think from this lens instead of just getting excited about a new AI tool being launched last month... 5. Time your moves strategically The McKinsey 3 Horizons approach helps sequence your AI journey: what do we optimize now, what do we build next, and what new business models might emerge? Without this, teams might try to do everything at once and achieve nothing. 6. Build the full system, not just the tools The AI Strategy Canvas reminds us that successful AI isn't just about the technology - it's about governance, capabilities, ethics, and organizational change. The companies getting real results aren't just deploying tools; they're rewiring how they work. Leadership teams don't need another AI deck, vendor pitch or new shiny tool that will solve everything ;-) they need a map for making choices that stick. Keeping the reality of actually executing on AI in mind. Are you part of a leadership team stuck in AI paralysis? Let's grab a coffee. Creating momentum and helping you choices is what I do.

How to Identify Moonshots and Prioritize Projects. Not all ideas are worth pursuing. How do you identify the game-changers? Use the Capability vs. Opportunity Analysis framework to strategically assess and prioritize projects based on two key dimensions: 1. Internal Capability – Do you have the expertise, resources, and readiness to execute? 2. Market Opportunity – Is there demand, a competitive edge, and strong revenue potential? The Four Strategic Zones: 1. "Do" Zone – High Capability + High Opportunity These projects are perfectly aligned with your strengths and the market’s needs. They offer high potential returns and should be prioritized for execution. 2. "Maybe" Zone – High Capability, Low Opportunity OR Low Capability, High Opportunity If you have the skills but the market isn't ripe, consider waiting or pivoting. If the market is booming but your capabilities are lacking, assess whether you can build or acquire the necessary expertise. These projects require deeper evaluation before committing resources. 3. "Moonshots" – High Opportunity, Low Capability These are the big, bold bets. The potential is massive, but you may lack the resources or expertise to execute today. Success in this zone requires: Innovation – Can you create a breakthrough solution? Investment – Are you willing to commit significant time and capital? Strategic Partnerships – Can you collaborate with experts who complement your gaps? 4. "Don’t" Zone – Low Capability + Low Opportunity If a project lacks both capability and market potential, it's a distraction. Avoid wasting time and resources here. Why This Framework Matters By mapping your projects using this model, you ensure that your efforts align with both strategic advantage and market demand. It helps avoid chasing every new idea and instead focus on initiatives that drive real impact. Follow Tim Vipond, FMVA® for more!

Diverse teams are powerful, but only if they’re designed to be. Just putting different people together isn’t enough. What I’ve learned over 11+ years is that true  🧠 Collective Intelligence only emerges when diversity is intentionally activated. 🖌 My Blueprint to unlock it: 🔹 Cognitive diversity It’s about bringing different thinking styles. Teams that embrace divergent ways of solving problems uncover creative solutions that others miss. 🔹 Demographic Diversity The presence of different intersectional identities and lived experiences creates a richer understanding of potential blind spots and unmet needs. 🔹 Experiential Diversity Diverse career paths and life stories equip teams with practical insights that can cut through “tried-and-true” methods that often fail in complex, changing environments. 🔹 Psychological Safety This is the game-changer. Without it, diversity backfires. High-performing teams create a “safe container” where everyone—from the quiet thinkers to the bold disruptors—can voice their ideas without fear. 🔹 Inclusive Decision-Making Diversity is wasted if decisions are still made by the loudest voice in the room. Structured inclusion ensures that varied perspectives aren’t just heard but drive the direction forward. The result? 1️⃣ Faster, smarter decisions: diverse insights reduce blind spots and increase confidence in strategic choices, helping leaders respond swiftly to market changes. 2️⃣ Increased innovation and agility: aligned teams leverage diverse perspectives to solve complex problems creatively and adapt to new challenges with resilience. 3️⃣ Stronger engagement and retention: when teams feel psychologically safe and included, they’re more committed and motivated. This translates to lower turnover and higher morale. The path to unlocking your team’s full potential starts with aligning on the right elements—diversity, psychological safety, and inclusion in decisions. 🤔 P.S. Where is your team on the path to collective intelligence—and what’s your next step?

This is the sneakiest trap entrepreneurs fall into: (I've personally fallen into this one multiple times) It's called: Optimizing the Useless Elon was once asked: "what's the biggest mistake engineers make?" He said: "Optimizing that which shouldn't exist." Now, if you find it really easy to fall into this trap (like me), then here's a simple framework that we used to build our first 8-figure business that I think you'll find useful. It's called D.O.W.N.T.I.M.E. This framework (borrowed from Lean Manufacturing) is all about learning to identify and eliminate WASTE within your business. Here's how to use this acronym to optimize your business: 1. DEFECTS If you don't have time to do something right, then when will you ever have the time to fix it? Defective products are a margin killer. Defects costs material, time, energy, morale, customer satisfaction, reputation, and more... 2. OVERPROCESSING Determine the customer's expectation of quality. Exceed it by ~15%. Diminishing returns kick in beyond this point. Want to increase quality? Increase price and your customer's corresponding expectation. Want to decrease quality? Decrease price. 3. WAITING Teams become increasing inefficient as they grow. People waste large amounts of time waiting for somebody in some other department to complete a task before they can move forward. Combat this by creating "simultaneous" (not "sequential") processes whenever possible. 4. Non-Used Employee Genius Your people are your most valuable resource. Treat them as such. Make sure they're not only sitting on the right seat, but that you're tapping into their unique genius (whatever that may be). 5. TRANSPORTATION The excessive movement of a "product" or "material" through a process. When moving things through a facility, straight lines are your friend. When moving things through a work cell, the "u" is your friend. 6. INVENTORY Necessary evil, especially in a world with next day delivery expectations. We're a "just in time" manufacturer, so balancing "enough" inventory with "too much" is one of the hardest problems we've had to solve for. 7. MOTION The excessive movement of yourself through a process. Example: Walking 10 steps to get the hammer 10 times per day. 10 x 10 x 280 (working days /year) = 28,000 steps 2,000 steps/mile 28,000/2,000 = 14 miles /year Move the tool. 8. Excess Production This gets turned into Inventory, but it's the unintended result of a process exceeding demand. Don't get this one figured out and you'll drown in inventory. This concept of D.O.W.N.T.I.M.E. works in ANY business, but it all comes down to culture. Training new employees in this concept is the most important thing we do. Why? Because once you know how to identify waste, you start to see it everywhere... Even in areas you know nothing about (like me in manufacturing). And once you control for DOWNTIME... your UPSIDE is practically unlimited.

30 60 90 Day Plans can be a very useful and simple method to drive specific process improvement projects or initiatives I generally use them to plan out specific projects and goals within an overall Continuous Improvement (CI) approach. 💠 I start with identifying a specific issue, and then breaking down the plan into three phases- 30 days, 60 days and 90 days. That's all kept very high-level, as in the visual below. 💠 The first 30 days are usually focused on learning and planning, the next 30 days are focused on implementation and monitoring and the final 30 days are focused on evaluation and optimization. The whole approach is kept in line with Lean Six Sigma thinking: PDSA- Plan Do Study Act and DMAIC- Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control. 💠 Beyond the high-level plan, it's important to get into the nitty gritty details of improvement. This involves setting specific milestones for the end of each of the 30 day periods and agreeing roles and responsibilities with each team member. 💠 It is REALLY important to have systems and processes that support scheduled check-ins. If you are using cycle planning, the team must agree how they will communicate and collaborate. It may be a mixture of daily huddles, weekly team meetings, 1:1's or something else. 💠 It helps to use simple project management tools (e.g. Trello, Asana, or Microsoft Project) to visualize progress and manage tasks. Just make sure that support is high if people are unfamiliar with the technology as technology could be barrier otherwise! 💠 I like to keep it simple and at the end of each 30-day period, review the progress made towards the milestones. Discuss what worked well and what didn’t, and use these insights to improve the next phase. 💠 Remember to recognize all efforts and celebrate the achievements at each milestone. 💠 And when it comes to evaluation, conduct a thorough review of the entire initiative at the end of 90 days. Assess the outcomes against the original objectives. Gather feedback from the team on the process and outcomes to inform future projects. 💠 Really importantly, build in a continuous improvement approach to your process management. Establish a routine of regular feedback, monitoring, and adaptation to continually improve the process. Have you any experience with cycle planning? Have you any tips for people? Leave your thoughts in the comments 🙏 #changemanagement #strategicplanning #goals #continuousimprovement #cycleplanning #projectmanagement

How I spot inexperienced creative teams: No contingency plan. Listen, the years and stress in this industry teaches you three things: 1. Not everything will go according to the plan. 2. Prevention is better than cure. 3. The best customer experience is under promise - over deliver. How to do that: 1. Add contingency to your budget for unexpected costs (10% is usually okay). 2. Communicate to your client when they should expect a draft and to block time in their calendar for feedback. 3. Communicate a timeline to your team that has a deadline before the deadline you gave to your client as there are always internal quality checks. 4. Find backups for any 3rd party suppliers as you have less control over them and something can fall through. 5. Always pay for insurance (the number of productions that go without it is mad). A contingency plan is more than just a safety net. → It's about foresight and preparation. → It's about ensuring smooth operations. → It's what makes clients trust and value your work. Do it today. Or learn it the hard way.

What would happen if a bank ran out of cash for even a single day? This is not a theoretical question—it is the reason every bank relies on something most people have never heard of: a Liquidity Playbook. Liquidity is the lifeblood of banking. Without it, even the most profitable banks can fail. Yet, liquidity crises often emerge suddenly, triggered by events like unexpected customer withdrawals, market disruptions, or changes in interest rates. So, what is a Liquidity Playbook? It is a carefully crafted, pre-approved plan that ensures the bank can access cash at a moment’s notice. It includes: Funding Sources: A diversified list of where to raise funds—whether through deposits, central banks, or wholesale markets. Early Warning Indicators: Metrics to detect potential liquidity risks, such as unusual deposit outflows or tightening funding markets. Stress Scenarios: Simulations of extreme events to test how the bank would respond under pressure, like a credit downgrade or a market-wide liquidity freeze. Contingency Plans: Specific actions to take during a crisis, such as selling liquid assets or activating credit lines. The playbook is not just a regulatory requirement—it is a survival tool. During the 2008 financial crisis, banks with robust liquidity plans fared far better than those without. More recently, the collapse of institutions like Silicon Valley Bank highlighted how critical it is to manage liquidity proactively rather than reactively. The fascinating part? The science of liquidity planning requires balancing precision with unpredictability. A playbook must account for potential future shocks while ensuring the bank does not over-allocate resources that could be used more profitably elsewhere. Why should you care? Because liquidity is what keeps your bank account accessible, your payments flowing, and the financial system stable. The next time you see a headline about a bank facing “liquidity issues,” you will know that this is not just a technical problem—it is a challenge that goes to the heart of banking resilience.

A common partnership snafu is that companies want partnership success, but don’t provide the resources to get there. I heard of a case where a whole marketing team quit, the partnerships team was given no marketing support, and they didn't yet have an integration with product -- and yet, the CEO expected the partnership strategy to deliver instant revenue. Wild. But not uncommon. Partnerships can't thrive in a vacuum. They need cross-functional support—marketing, product integration, sales enablement—all aligned to succeed. Before you set revenue targets for your partnerships, ask yourself: Do we have the resources to support them? If the answer is no, you have to help your leadership teams to reconsider their expectations. To help create the cross-functional support needed for partnerships to thrive, here are four strategies: 1. Involve Cross-Functional Leaders from the Very Beginning Bring key leaders from marketing, sales, and product into the partnership planning phase. Early involvement gives them a sense of ownership and ensures they understand how partnerships align with their own goals. Strategy: Schedule a kick-off meeting with stakeholders from each relevant department. Create a shared roadmap that outlines how partnerships will impact each team and their specific contributions. 2. Tie Partnership Success to Department KPIs To gain buy-in, tie partnership goals directly to the KPIs of each department. Aligning partnership outcomes with what each team is measured on ensures they have skin in the game. Strategy: During planning sessions, ask each department head how partnerships can contribute to their targets. Build specific KPIs for each function into the overall partnership strategy. 3. Create a Resource Exchange Agreement Formalize the support needed from each department with a resource exchange agreement. This sets clear expectations on what each function will contribute—whether it's a dedicated product team member for integrations or marketing resources for co-branded campaigns. It turns vague promises into commitments. Strategy: Draft a simple document that outlines the roles, responsibilities, and deliverables each team will provide, then get sign-off from department heads and the executive team. 4. Demonstrate Early Wins for Buy-In Quick wins go a long way toward securing ongoing resources. Identify a small pilot project with an internal team that shows immediate impact. Whether it's a small co-marketing campaign or a limited integration, these early successes build momentum and demonstrate the value of supporting partnerships. Strategy: Select one or two partners to run a pilot with, focused on delivering measurable outcomes like leads generated or product adoption. Use this success story to demonstrate value to other departments and secure further commitment. Partnership success requires cross-functional alignment. Because partnerships don’t happen in a silo.

Over the years, I've discovered the truth: Game-changing products won't succeed unless they have a unified vision across sales, marketing, and product teams. When these key functions pull in different directions, it's a death knell for go-to-market execution. Without alignment on positioning and buyer messaging, we fail to communicate value and create disjointed experiences. So, how do I foster collaboration across these functions? 1) Set shared goals and incentivize unity towards that North Star metric, be it revenue, activations, or retention. 2) Encourage team members to work closely together, building empathy rather than skepticism of other groups' intentions and contributions. 3) Regularly conduct cross-functional roadmapping sessions to cascade priorities across departments and highlight dependencies. 4) Create an environment where teams can constructively debate assumptions and strategies without politics or blame. 5) Provide clarity for sales on target personas and value propositions to equip them for deal conversations. 6) Involve all functions early in establishing positioning and messaging frameworks. Co-create when possible. By rallying together around customers’ needs, we block and tackle as one team towards product-market fit. The magic truly happens when teams unite towards a shared mission to delight users!