An L&D Strategy Isn’t Enough. You Need a Roadmap.

I remember the first time I drafted an L&D strategy. As the first L&D hire, I had a laundry list of requests waiting for me, including creating a global onboarding program and training junior engineers who were preparing to become people managers (simple, right?). 

Turns out, writing that L&D strategy was harder than I expected. First, I had to do a robust needs assessment  to understand what was driving the respective requests. Once I had a better understanding of the business’s needs, I could more clearly envision how these requests would coalesce in a singular strategy. 

This vision allowed me to prioritize work, at least in my own way. As a team of one, I didn’t think it was necessary to go through the trouble of drafting a formal roadmap. That was short-lived. 

My team expanded, and so did the training requests. I needed a way to manage and track everything, so I hastily put together a roadmap mid-year. 

Learn from my mistakes. Whether you’re a team of one or a global function, you need a way to operationalize your strategy. Priorities need to be visible, work trackable, and impact measurable. Here’s how.

What’s the difference between an L&D strategy and a roadmap?

An L&D strategy defines the capabilities the business needs to build to be competitive and agile in their industry.

An effective strategy is grounded in measurable outcomes tied to business KPIs. A strategy is a vision, and leaders need to see their problems reflected in it. Let's say you're struggling to retain mid-level managers. Your strategy names that as a priority, with development initiatives tied to reducing attrition. That's something leaders immediately understand and get behind.

An L&D roadmap turns that vision into prioritized work.

An effective roadmap is a shared plan that shows what's happening when, and by whom. In addition to clarifying who is accountable for what task, it also includes measurement plans and notes tradeoffs. Essentially, any stakeholder should be able to see your roadmap and understand why you've chosen this work to happen now (perhaps over something else), and how success will be measured.

If you're an L&D function tired of taking orders and wanting to be strategic, a roadmap is the way to make that happen. A roadmap is a forcing function for L&D departments looking to become less reactive and more strategic. It allows you to push back with substance ("here's why we can't prioritize this work right now").

That's why I consider a roadmap to be a reflection of the maturity of your L&D function.

How mature is your L&D function?

There are a lot of L&D "maturity" frameworks out there. They often promise to be diagnostic, offering tools for determining where your L&D function sits on a 4 or 5 level scale. Each framework approaches this work slightly differently.

Deloitte's high-impact learning organization research maps organizations across four levels, from transactional and essential to agile and indispensable. Others, like this model, take a more granular approach, building across themes, levels, and KPIs.

Most models describe a similar spectrum. At one end, L&D is reactive, taking requests from the business and never true partners in advancing outcomes. At the other end, L&D is transformative, leading a skills-based strategy and driving business outcomes through personalized learning at scale.

In between are the stages most functions occupy, building structured programs, starting to demonstrate impact, and gradually earning a seat at the proverbial table.

If one of these frameworks stimulates productive conversation amongst your team and stakeholders, great. I encourage you to use it in the process of designing your strategy and roadmap. If, however, you find yourself overwhelmed at not only diagnosing, but habitually returning to these vague frameworks, I get that too.

The goal of these maturity tools is to be honest about how your L&D function operates, and where there's room for improvement.

💡Tip: If you're feeling stuck in that first level (across any maturity model), I'd recommend reading L&D Order Taker No More! by Jess Almlie.

How do you design an L&D strategy and roadmap?

Once you're aligned around how your L&D function is currently operating, and how you'd like it to be operating, you are ready to tackle your strategy and roadmap.

The challenge of designing a strategy and roadmap is that they rarely follow a neat process. On one hand you have your vision for your function and your priorities based on your data and expertise. On the other, you have your business and what it needs from you. Those may be in conflict, so you'll need to work on these things in tandem.

At the same time, you still need a clear point of view for your strategy. One way to do that is to borrow a positioning exercise from product:

• Who is your target audience?
• What are their needs?
• What is the main benefit of your learning offering?
• Why should your audience believe you?

You may run this exercise and come away with a clear point of view on what L&D should focus on. Think of it as your vision for the year.

The next step is to translate that vision through your needs analysis. This is where you test it against what is actually happening in the business and decide where to focus.

Phase 1: Assess

When building your roadmap, you will ask this question repeatedly:

What problem are we solving?

You probably already have a list of training requests. Your goal is to pressure-test this list against the business’s priorities and your point of view (from the positioning exercise). You’re looking at the data. This might be business metrics or stakeholder inputs before you commit to anything. You might think that you need to focus on manager effectiveness this year, but discover that ICs transitioning into leadership roles (like project management) need more support. 

💡Tip: If you're looking for a robust needs assessment methodology, I recommend Offbeat's collection.

Phase 2: Align

Once you've defined the problem, you need to decide:

What are we committing to this cycle?

Yes, whatever you commit to is subject to change. Expect to add, prioritize or even remove initiatives when you have a compelling business case. Your goal is to map out a realistic plan so your team stays focused and understands their priorities over time.

You need to align on:

• What matters most right now
• Who owns the work, and who is accountable for the outcome
• What resources are available, and what tradeoffs are required
• When this needs to happen, and how it fits into business cycles

L&D may lead the work, but the business needs to own the capability gaps it is asking to solve.

Align your roadmap to business cycles

Before you lock anything in, align your roadmap to how the business operates. Whether L&D is directly involved in these processes or not, your roadmap depends on what comes out of them. If you haven't mapped it out already, determine:

• When are business goals set (annually, quarterly)?
• When does budget forecasting happen? Is there any recasting happening?
• When are performance reviews? Hiring ebbs and flows?

The last thing you need is to finalize your roadmap only to find out that you're getting less funding than you expected, or that there's an unforeseen hiring boost that requires a reallocation of your resources. Save yourself the headache, and plan accordingly.

Phase 3: Plan

Now that you have a short list of commitments for the upcoming year, you need to plan the work. If you're unsure how long something will reasonably take, ask your team.

What does the work look like over time?

You're defining:

• What happens first, and what can wait
• How much work fits into each cycle
• Where you build versus reuse existing content
• What "good enough" looks like at each stage

Factor in time for everything from a needs analysis to content creation, stakeholder alignment, delivery, program evaluation, and reinforcement. Deciding how the solution will be delivered — everything from the medium to additional support — is part of this process.

Constraints like team capacity, budget, and SME and stakeholder availability all impact your planning (as do competing priorities).

💡Tip: Build your roadmap in whatever tool makes the most sense for your organization. If your company uses a project management tool for all roadmaps, then build it there.

Phase 4: Share

When you have a drafted roadmap in hand (metaphorically speaking), it’s time to get feedback from your stakeholders. 

Are we aligned on what this roadmap means?

This includes leadership, partners in content creation and delivery, and the teams who requested or depend on the work.

You’re showing what you’re committing to, what you’re not doing, and where you need input. The conversation should stay focused on decisions that affect the roadmap.

Guide that discussion with a few questions:

• Are we solving the right problems?
• Are we prioritizing the right audiences?
• Are there constraints we’ve missed?

Leaders may push for more, and teams may flag capacity issues. SMEs may not be available when you planned (shocking, I know). Those inputs should shape the roadmap while it’s still easy to adjust.

💡Tip: Bring your team into this process early. Ask directly: can we deliver this with the time and resources we have?

Phase 5: Iterate

Throughout the year, you'll continue to iterate on your roadmap as new priorities and requests come in.

What do we change based on what we're seeing?

Now you're using data to decide what changes need to be made. You’re looking for good enough evidence to determine whether to keep (and perhaps scale), revise, or stop a training program.

That includes:

• What's being used and where engagement drops
• Whether behavior is changing
• How learning is showing up in business outcomes

Some work will expand while other work will be dropped. Priorities shift based on what's happening in the business.

If this phase goes well, you're using what you're seeing to decide what to do next.

Example: Global onboarding roadmap

How to measure the success of your L&D roadmap

I remember the first time I learned about NPS. For those of you who may be blissfully unaware, NPS (or Net Promoter Score) is a way to measure customer satisfaction on a scale of -100 to +100, and it somehow became popular as a way to measure L&D programs. I had a leader who insisted on reporting on NPS for flagship programs. Not only did I misunderstand how to calculate it my first time around, I also struggled to understand how it demonstrated impact.

The challenge with measurement is that you're living in this tension between what leaders may think are helpful metrics for L&D success, the best practices you know to be true indicators of progress, and what the business actually cares about. These are not always the same thing.

The KPIs below are an attempt to navigate that tension by showing you where you're following through with your commitments.

Leadership alignment

What it measures: How consistently L&D is part of the conversations where business decisions get made, including budget cycles, workforce planning, and performance reviews.

What good looks like: Regular, structured touch points with senior stakeholders, at least quarterly. If leadership is surprised by what L&D is working on, or roadmap commitments are shifting without a clear business justification, your alignment cadence needs attention.

Learner engagement

What it measures: Whether the programs on your roadmap are reaching the people they are supposed to reach, and whether those people are returning.

What good looks like: Monthly active learner rate is a more useful signal than completion rate. It tells you whether learning is becoming a habit or a one-time event. If your active learner rate is declining mid-program, that is worth investigating before the quarter closes.

SME engagement

What it measures: Whether the content you committed to building is getting built to the right standard, and whether the people who own the knowledge are genuinely involved.

What good looks like: Subject matter experts should be contributing to content design from the start. A useful proxy is the proportion of programs where an SME was involved before the build phase began. When SME involvement drops, content quality tends to follow, and so does credibility with the business.

Business impact

What it measures: Whether the capability gaps your roadmap committed to closing are actually closing, in terms the business already tracks.

What good looks like: The right metrics depend on what your roadmap committed to. If you committed to reducing time-to-productivity, track time-to-productivity. If you committed to improving manager effectiveness, track manager-related attrition or 360 feedback scores. Kirkpatrick and Phillips ROI can help structure the approach, with the business metric you committed to at the outset as your starting point.

How AI is reshaping your roadmap

AI is changing what you can realistically commit to in your roadmap. L&D teams using AI for content production are seeing meaningful capacity gains, but speed doesn't necessarily drive the KPIs above.

The bigger issue is that only 39% of L&D teams are using AI for strategic work, like evaluation and measurement, according to Synthesia's 2026 AI in L&D Report. That means most teams are getting faster without getting smarter.

So what does that mean for your roadmap? You can reduce the time expected to create and localize content, provided you're using quality AI tools. It may also change how you deliver content, giving you more agility to build personalized learning at scale and get closer to real-time skills intelligence.

Use that freed-up capacity to focus on whether you're driving business impact. The risk of readiness debt is real: defining your roadmap by volume of content created and delivered is a trap worth avoiding.

💡Tip: If you'd like to learn more about AI in L&D, I recommend starting here.

How to get started (even mid-cycle)

If you're biding time before your company's annual planning cycles, use it to start shaping your roadmap.

Take the time to host listening sessions with HR Business Partners and department heads. Ask them where performance is struggling and what data they have access to that supports their assessment. After these meetings, aggregate your notes and surface any themes (an LLM can help here). You'll be glad you have data-informed needs to work from when planning begins.

But don't stop there. Take this time to connect with your L&D peers to learn what their organizations are experiencing. Sometimes you need a little inspiration when envisioning the next year.

💡Tip: If you're looking for ways to connect with, here's my guide to industry podcasts, newsletters, and conferences. If you don't have time to read the latest industry research, I keep this list of L&D trends up-to-date.