Designing a Successful Digital Roadmap to Meet Business Objectives
Why is a roadmap or plan important? What does it mean to have a roadmap?
Some of the benefits of having a roadmap:
Discipline around a continuous delivery of functional and technical capabilities and improvements to your customer. The market is changing, customer expectations are changing so quickly, that a bank really cannot afford to allow their customers to sort of sit stagnant with the same features and functions or the same look and feel for any significant length of time. Some banks today are starting to really evaluate exactly what features in their app, or exactly what features in their internet banking are the customers really using. There should be clear and measurable ROI on the expenditure for these upgrades.
The ability of the bank’s team to manage delivery risks. It spans internal digital capabilities for staff improvement and staff management or managing delivery of digital capabilities to the corporate and business customers. Managing delivery risk could be everything from understanding the dependencies you may have on infrastructure and security, understanding the delivery risk relative to what’s required from the bank versus what may be required from your vendor partner, as an example. Or even what may be required from the business if you’re doing projects internally with your IT organization. But managing risk is something that certainly gives you some visibility if the bank has good roadmap and a strategy to work against.
Optimisation is not just about what gets delivered from a benchmarking or performance perspective, but it’s also optimization of user journeys, not just reusability of code, but providing consistent experience across channels and domains. If you’re not planning for optimization, you probably won’t achieve optimization. It, it’s not something that really is accomplished with just a bit of an afterthought. The ability to, to optimize everything you’re doing in digital is something you have to plan for. So just because you’ve got a strategy and a roadmap doesn’t mean that you’re finished with the journey.
The three pillars for the creation and maintenance and execution of a roadmap:
- Customer Focus
Focus Group Discussion: They provide a great opportunity to get feedback from a bank’s customers about not
only ways the processes can improve, but things that are done well. Focus groups are not just about finding fault
but are also a way of, of validating things that the bank is doing correctly as well.External Reviews: Feedback from the play stores, independent reviews from analysts etc.
Competitor evaluation: A bank should be regularly study and benchmark what the competition is doing and
implementing technologies and functionalities that are required to be competitive. Focus on the customer is
absolutely a key pillar for what ultimately the roadmap should look like. There should a joint consensus between
the product, marketing and business in crafting a product roadmap. - IT CapabilityThis could be the bank’s internal technologies or of a vendor partner of a combination of both. The question of build or buy will depend on what is planned in the roadmap and whether those technological capabilities and talent are in-house or the need to collaborate with a vendor to bring those technologies and talent.
- Extended Business Team support
Some of they key roles that a bank’s team needs to have as part of the roadmap planning include solution architecture, business analyst, product owners, development owners and operations people. These are the team members that help define not only the feasibilities of the features/functions, the architecture but also sizing the efforts required to build them. These are critical for prioritizing the features on the roadmap.
Importance of an omnichannel solution
Today there are banks who either have multiple standalone apps or different vendors for different channels. This could impact looking at the roadmap holistically. It could also affect the customer experience as he may have to download separate apps or have a different journey on different digital channels. So, this is something banks need to think about when planning their roadmaps.
Does your vendor have roadmaps for their products and platform?
With many vendors offering similar product and platform models, it is important to know if they have product and technology roadmaps. This is important when evaluating vendors for your digital banking needs. If you are a market leader or aiming to be competitive, you will certainly want to look at rolling out new capabilities every quarter or every few weeks. This gives them an advantage of testing new features and see which resonate and adjust their roadmaps accordingly. A vendor who has a structured approach towards roadmap will enable the bank to experiment and roll out features with faster time to market.
At Tagit, we work closely with clients to develop and implement a holistic roadmap that is aligned to their business objectives and brings their digital strategy to life.
Get in touch with us for a 1—1 consultation! Write to us at info@tagitmobile.com or submit your details via the ‘Contact Us’ form.
