The 90-day marketing roadmap, demystified
Every consultant promises a 90-day plan. Most of them are colour-coded calendars. Here's what actually belongs in one, and what doesn't.
The roadmap problem
A roadmap is supposed to do one thing: tell the team what to do next, and why. Most of them don't. They list activity instead of intent, treat every quarter as equal weight, and confuse a Gantt chart with a strategy.
A real 90-day roadmap fits on one page and answers four questions.
The four questions
- What are we trying to be true in 90 days? Not deliverables. Outcomes. "Three named customers in financial services" beats "launch FSI campaign."
- What are the two or three workstreams that move us there? Pick. The point of strategy is what you don't do.
- Who owns each workstream end-to-end? Not by committee. One name.
- What is the decision we'll make at day 60? A roadmap with no built-in inflection point isn't a roadmap, it's a wishlist.
What doesn't belong
- A list of channels. Channels are means, not goals.
- A content calendar. That's an output of the roadmap, not the roadmap itself.
- Tooling decisions. They'll change. The strategy shouldn't.
The day-60 review
This is the meeting nobody schedules and everyone needs. Sixty days in, you have enough signal to know whether the bet is working. If it is, you press. If it isn't, you cut, fast — before the rest of the quarter is spent defending the original plan.
The teams that compound are the ones that schedule this meeting before they need it.
