Strategic Gap Analysis in Action: Is Rolla Stuck in a Maintenance Trap?

Today is Rolla’s public roadmap turn, and in this post, I'm going to perform a strategic gap analysis to see if there is alignment between its strategy and its roadmap. Unfortunately, a lack of strategic alignment is a very common problem for companies, and it often prevents them from moving the needle and advancing their vision.

First, a quick note on Rolla. Rolla creates products that help "up level team health and fitness." They are focused on community, challenges, and improving the health of individuals, gyms, and corporate teams.

Rolla's Strategic Goals: What Are They Trying to Do?

I've been digging into Rolla's website and blogs to find their strategic goals. I've found what I think are four key pillars of their strategy:

• Community First: In their mission statements, they talk about creating community engagement, challenges, and growth. This seems to be the most important strategic goal and is very connected to their vision.

• Partnerships: Rolla aims for integrations with popular platforms that people are already using, like smartwatches and fitness trackers. This helps them gather data and integrate it into their products.

• Gyms: They're building for gyms and fitness professionals to help them engage, retain, and grow their gym communities.

• Employee Health: They want to work with workplaces to improve wellness by converting daily activities into engaging team challenges.

Rolla's Public Roadmap: A Deep Dive 

I took all the publicly available information from the roadmap and put it into a spreadsheet. While this is very manual work, it helps me understand the bigger picture. The roadmap is mostly a set of community-driven requests and bug reports. I focused my analysis on the "Planned" and "In Progress" stages, as these represent the most current work.

What I Think Is Working 

• Community and Engagement: Rolla has a very active community. There’s plenty of activity and voting on features, especially for Rolla World (the community platform) and Rolla One (the health tracking app). This shows that their strategy is working, and people are engaged.

• Strategic Prioritization: It's a good sign that the items being prioritized aren't always the highest-voted ones. This likely means they are taking strategic alignment into account and are not just building whatever the community asks for.

• Focus on Key Partnerships: You can see some of their strategic goals reflected in the roadmap, particularly around partnerships with companies like Strava and Wahoo Kickr.

What I Think Could Be Improved 

• Heavy Maintenance Mode: This is the biggest red flag. In the "In Progress" stage, only two items are feature requests; the other 29 are bug reports. This indicates a team in firefighting mode, which prevents growth and innovation. This trend seems to have been going on for a while, as their "Delivered" column shows 177 bugs fixed versus only 30 features delivered.

• Unclear Strategic Focus: While a lot of work is being done for the community and partnerships, there are no clear items on the roadmap that specifically target the "Gyms" and "Employee Health" strategies. This doesn't mean they aren't working on them, but they aren't visible in this public-facing roadmap.

• Unclear Roadmap Stages: The "Standby" and "Under Review" stages are confusing. "Standby" seems to be a feature graveyard with 112 items and only one bug report, which is very suspicious given the high number of bugs in other columns. This indicates an internal process inefficiency.

• Integration Bottleneck: While there are some integrations, the requests seem to be centered around a few specific apps like Strava and Kickr. This might be putting them in a niche corner of the market and could limit their potential for growth.

Strategic Alignment & Potential ROI 

I've calculated the strategic alignment of Rolla's public roadmap.

• Strategic Initiatives: 39%

• Supporting Work: 32%

• Maintenance Work: 29%

This alignment is low, and it's heavily skewed toward fighting fires. If we only look at what's "in progress," the strategic alignment drops to just 20%. That's not good.

But even with this low alignment, there is a huge opportunity. Based on an estimated R&D team of 19 people and a cost of $100,000 per employee, Rolla could be looking at a potential reinvestment of over $950,000 per year.

This isn't about hiring new people; it's about reallocating the same resources to more strategic initiatives. They could be funding two to three entirely new initiatives per year without hiring a single new person.

Final Recommendations 

• Address Firefighting Mode: The high number of bugs is a serious concern. This prevents innovation and builds technical debt that can spiral out of control.

• Clarify the Strategy: The roadmap needs to have clearer items that support all four of their strategic pillars, especially "Gyms" and "Employee Health."

• Balance Community with Strategy: While a community-driven roadmap is great, a heavy reliance on it can lead to a "reactive" mode. Rolla should be in the driver's seat of their own strategy, using community feedback to support their vision, not define it.

This kind of strategic focus isn't a happy accident; it's the result of having a clear framework to align your team's work with your strategic goals.

Ready to drive change in your company?

Ready to stop building features and start building business impact? Join my webinar, "Are You Building Features... or Business Impact?" to learn how to measure and fix your strategic misalignment.

You can find the video version of this post here: