"Tell less and ask more." — Unknown
I remind myself regularly that my advice is usually not as good as I think it is. It is very easy for consultants to parachute into a situation, misread the actual problem, and then turn around with solutions that address the wrong question entirely.
One of the more humbling experiences of my life was attending the University of Texas School of Law. Before you stop reading, know this: I am the second-best kind of lawyer. A non-practicing one. The best kind is, of course, a dead one.
The moment I knew I would never practice came in the second semester of my first year. The visiting professor — a co-author of our textbook — was teaching through Socratic dialogue. He called on Barry, a student so quiet he would never have spoken voluntarily. The exchange went back and forth for nearly ten minutes. At the end, the professor asked Barry why the class should side with him. Barry replied that his argument had been made by the visiting professor himself — in a research paper cited in the footnotes of the very reading we'd been assigned.
Let that sink in. We were assigned nearly 400 pages of reading per day, and Barry had not only read the footnotes but had tracked down and read the source paper referenced within them. The professor was visiting unexpectedly. Barry had not raised his hand. Barry set a standard of preparation I was not up to meeting. But his example permanently redirected my focus. I stopped trying to have the answers and started learning to ask better questions.
When building a SaaS roadmap, you must know the goals — and not just the ones written in the executive summary. We must start with the end state in order to prepare the path.
Goal-Setting Framework
◆ Define strategic, tactical, and operational goals as distinct layers — don't let them bleed into each other. ◆ Choose objectives based on your unique strategy, not on what your industry conventionally pursues. ◆ Consider goals across all four perspectives: financial, customer, internal process, and learning and growth. ◆ Use the "Verb + Adjective + Noun" format to force precision. A goal should describe an action, a quality, and an object. ◆ Write "strategic objective statements" that clarify intent — not just what you want to achieve, but why it matters.