Strategy Roadmap (12-24 months)

Turn the strategy you chose in 7.8 into a plan that says what happens when, who owns it, what waits for what, and how you will know early that it is off course.

Practitioner method. The staged logic (foundation, pilot, scale) follows the Uppsala internationalization model, which is influential but of mixed support. The metric discipline follows OKR practice (Grove; Doerr), a practitioner method with thin research of its own. Phase lengths and the number of bets are rules of thumb.

Use it when:

• You have picked a direction (new market, new offer, new operating model) and need to turn it into a sequence people can own.
• You must show a board, a manager, a bank or a partner what happens in the first two years and what it will cost.
• Several things need to start at once and you suspect some of them depend on others.

Skip it when:

• You have not yet chosen between options: use 7.7 Strategic Option Cards and 7.8 Preferred Strategy Sheet first.
• The work is one bounded project with a fixed scope: use 8.5 Project Charter and 8.9 Action Plan & Kanban.

A roadmap carries two ideas. The first is staging: build a foundation, pilot, then scale. It echoes Johanson and Vahlne (1977), who describe commitment growing as knowledge grows, so each phase exists to produce the learning the next one spends. The evidence for that stepwise picture is mixed and digital firms often compress it, so treat the phases as a default sequence, not a law.

The second is metric discipline. It descends from OKR practice, begun by Grove (1983) and popularized by Doerr (2018). It is a practitioner method with little research of its own. The working mechanism is modest: a few explicit outcomes with owners and a review rhythm beat many implicit ones.

So the steps below limit you to three bets, force a dependency for every milestone, and require a leading indicator beside each lagging one. A roadmap that defends everything protects nothing, and a plan where nothing waits for anything else is a task list.

Say what you are betting on, in outcomes, and what you will not do. Take the strategy and markets from 7.8.

Strong answer: (illustrative) "North star: 12 percent of group sales from Germany within 24 months, at the margin of the home market." Not: "Become a leader in the German market."

Strategy and markets in scope (from 7.8):

North star outcome at 12 to 24 months:

What we will not do (so the bets are protected):

Hard constraints (budget, talent, time):

Assumption to test first (from 7.9 Assumptions & Risk Map):

Illustrative example: the company, roles and numbers are made up.

A Swedish maker of ventilation components, selling mainly in Sweden and Norway, picks Germany as its first market outside the Nordics.

Section 1: North star: German sales at 12 percent of group sales by month 24, at home-market margin. Bets: (1) one German distributor partner in the south, (2) a German-language technical file that passes the buyers' review, (3) a service point for spare parts. Not doing: private-label deals, a second country before month 13. Assumption to test first: German installers will specify the product without a local brand.

Section 2:

Section 3: quote requests per month (leading), installer training sessions held (leading), delivery lead time (leading), repeat-order share (lagging).