Staples use Strategic Roadmaps to communicate product strategy to executives
Tempo Team
Office retailer Staples needed to paint a clearer picture of how the work they were doing contributed to the company strategy. This is why they implemented Strategic Roadmaps, by Tempo.
Headquartered in Framingham, Massachusetts, Staples Inc. are primarily involved in the sale of office supplies and related products via retail channels and business-to-business delivery operations.
Lauren Kaeppner is a product team leader at Staples. She realized a few years ago that she needed a better roadmapping tool than Microsoft Excel. Lauren wanted to visualize what her team were up to for executives and other stakeholders, specifically how each product manager’s tasks were helping to push their product forward.
The path to success
Kaeppner typed “roadmap applications” into Google and found Strategic Roadmaps. She signed up for a free trial and started roadmapping right away. Kaeppner liked to the tool so much that she quickly enlisted ten of her product managers to use Roadmaps, too.
“Adopting Roadmaps into our product management organization has transformed how we manage our products,” Kaeppner says. “Roadmaps helps each of my product managers remain focused on the right mix of transformative efforts and backlog items for each of their products.”
Roadmaps were shared with different teams and stakeholders across the organization. The visibility and clarity into how Staples' products would evolve – and the ease in which roadmaps could be shared – was a welcome change.
Kaeppner added: “We’re positioned to be transparent at a moment’s notice. We can walk stakeholders through our product strategy live, right in the app.”
The roadmaps created by Kaeppner and her product managers were presented to the executive team. They were so impressed by Roadmaps’s visualization and sharing capabilities that they encouraged other departments to adopt the tool, too. And they did. Roadmaps is now used by a variety of teams across Staples to share plans and align on what’s coming up next.