Travel Portland: Using roadmapping to gain clarity, buy-in and transparency on priorities and align digital marketing stakeholders
Travel Portland is the destination marketing and management organization for Portland, Oregon. This not-for-profit organization supports the local economy by promoting Portland in imaginative ways and connecting visitors to authentic experiences. Their website attracts more than 5 million visitors per year and provides a great user experience to help visitors discover and navigate the city.
With local lodging taxes as its primary source of funding, Travel Portland had shrunk considerably as an organization during the pandemic and then started regrowing as travel resumed and the organization regained resources. With the prospect of continued resource growth, there was an opportunity for the marketing department’s digital, content and communications teams to start looking ahead to what they would like to achieve in the future.
Having worked with Travel Portland for many years as a senior technology consultant, including leading the technology and architecture work for their last two major website redesigns, I discussed with Senior Director of Digital Strategy Richard Tammar the idea of leading the digital, content and communications teams through a roadmapping process to evaluate opportunities to continue to enhance TravelPortland.com. Richard saw the benefit of having a facilitator to help the organization think through what opportunities there might be and prioritize them.
“I think it's helpful to bring everyone to the table and have someone there that is neutral on the outcomes. Even if people are doing their best to put a neutral hat on, everyone has a particular role within the organization, and some things may appear more important than others to us because of our roles.
Also, where people are at different levels within an organization, sometimes if you have a different idea than your boss, you might feel intimidated to say it. Having an independent third party work though this can take some of the perceived politics or hierarchy out of it and really draw the best ideas out of everyone at the table. I thought that Sam would do a good job at creating an environment where everyone felt able to express their ideas and to be regarded with equal merit.
Creating a roadmap for the continued development and strategic improvement of TravelPortland.com
I worked with digital, content and communications team members to establish an 18-month plan of prioritized initiatives.
We brought together seven stakeholders from across the three teams through a series of collaborative, creative, and structured workshops to define the organization’s pillars, promises and priorities and use them to establish a roadmap.
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Defining Pillars After identifying the key concerns such as responsibilities, challenges, and stakeholders, we grouped them and used them to define four key disciplines, which we call pillars — visitor experience, content operations, technology platform, and secondary audiences.
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Defining Promises Through the workshops, we dove deep into each of these pillars and collectively wrote down and refined what promises the organization needed to make to stakeholders to provide value. These promises include initiatives — features, capabilities, policies or products — to which the teams were prepared to commit.
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Defining Priorities To establish an initial sense of priority for the initiatives under consideration, we had each team member exercise a limited number of votes to distribute across the promises and conducted exercises to help identify the level of innovation, difficulty, and impact of initiatives defined by those promises. I then applied an algorithm to come up with a heuristic ranking for priorities based on impact, innovative-value, and feasibility.
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Establishing a Roadmap With a clear sense of prioritization, I then created a phased roadmap, placing each initiative into a timeline of now (this year), next (next year), or later (farther into the future). The team members and I reviewed this plan together and established project owners for specific initiatives, ensuring that there is someone who is responsible for moving each item forward at the appropriate time.
The roadmapping process uncovered some key insights. For example, one promise scored high in terms of priority, however, unlike other initiatives that surfaced, it wasn’t clear where the responsibility for it should land.
“Although we all felt that ‘helping visitors navigate the city’ was a very important goal, there was no natural project owner for that line-item. It pointed to a deeper issue, that visitor needs were not well represented in our planning processes.”
With this insight, the team redefined this promise into a long-term guiding initiative.
The structured workshops that we conducted using the roadmapping framework helped define a rhythm to move conversations along in a productive way, says Richard, avoiding having discussions that lack a clear conclusion. The team had lots of ideas, he adds, so getting everyone’s perspective on what they thought was most important through the voting exercises was a helpful clarifying lens to define priorities. Using a digital whiteboard to collaborate, write ideas down, and move them around also added a playful element to the process.
Richard says he appreciated having my presence and skills as a facilitator for the conversations.
“Sam brings a lot of added-value intelligence to the process. When people say something, he can rephrase that in a way which might be more intelligible to everyone else. He's listening carefully and can put things in a common language that everyone can understand or he can test people's ideas by repeating their idea back to them in a different language and check that we've all understood it.
It's very gentle facilitation. He's just got a very charming personality to lead the process, but doesn't bring any ego to it. He doesn't seem like he's driving you in a particular direction. He wants those ideas to appear organically from the group. He's got a process to tease those out, but it doesn't feel like he's directing it at all.”
Clarity, consensus and transparency in priorities for easier planning and communication
Informed by everything we uncovered during the process, Travel Portland now has a clear 18-month plan for the continued strategic development of TravelPortland.com that aligns all of their digital marketing stakeholders. Richard says it’s valuable to have clarity, consensus and transparency on their priorities — both within the digital, communications, and content teams as well as with other parts of the organization.
“We know where we are heading and everyone's bought into that. The process has helped make thoughts that were otherwise floating in the heads of various people a little more concrete and organized. It’s also helpful to other teams to know what's already on our plate and what we are considering.
It makes the budgeting process easier and it makes planning and communication a lot easier. It enables more concrete discussions about what could or has to give if new priorities emerge — what the choices are before us in terms of how we direct our energies.”
Within a week of establishing the roadmap, work began on one of the cornerstone projects we defined during the process. It’s one of the more difficult, yet highest priority initiatives. As a continuation of our work together, I’m working with the team responsible for this project to help them address the biggest barrier to moving this project forward through a couple of workshops.
Richard says the larger benefit of the roadmapping’s very collaborative process that he is looking forward to is helping people feel a greater sense of ownership over the upcoming work to implement the plan.
“Everyone is included and knows they're included and listened to, and I think there's a value in that outside of where you get to in the end. If people feel like they had a hand in shaping the direction of the organization, and they have the opportunity to see that vision come to reality, then their work is more meaningful.”