Plaid’s Guide to Building Your 2022 Enablement Roadmap: A Q&A with Taryn Rosada, Revenue Enablement Leader

As we head into 2022, revenue enablement professionals everywhere are thinking about plans for the new year. Where do you start? What’s the best way to gather input, prioritize your focus areas, and get everyone aligned? 

During a recent webinar, WorkRamp’s Director of Enablement Stephanie Middaugh interviewed Taryn Rosada, Revenue Enablement Leader at Plaid and an expert in the enablement community. Taryn shared her experience with building enablement roadmaps – as well as her simple yet extremely effective templates for planning the enablement roadmap, getting input from stakeholders, and making sure everyone is aligned before setting the finished roadmap in motion. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for the purpose of this blog post.

Q: What teams are you enabling at Plaid?

Taryn: We support a few different teams: our revenue team, which includes our new business group, the sales organization, and the customer engineering and account management teams. We also support our partnerships and support organizations. Our mission is to maximize employee performance. We do that by delivering learning experiences, tools, and processes that enable the team to do their best work, develop their skills and ultimately drive business results. 

Q. Where do you focus your efforts?

Taryn: We’re focused on five key areas: 

• New Hire Onboarding – We pick up where HR leaves off and build out tools and training for all roles to help employees onboard quickly and effectively.
• Product/Industry – This is all about what’s in our sales bag, and how do we sell it. Our customers come from a variety of verticals so our team is building programs to help our teams sell and service our customers.  
• People Development and Leadership – At the department level, team level, and individual level, we think about what we have available off the shelf, and what do we need to build to provide employees with opportunities to develop their skills and ideally grow their careers at Plaid. 
• Systems/Tools/Process – Here, we’re focused on our tech stack for the team, and we look at the tools that are making them most productive. Once we decide what those are, we focus on driving usage and adoption to see ROI because we pay for those tools. 
• Communications/Content – What are the right channels, and what is the right cadence to get information to the teams in a thoughtful and structured way to help them do their jobs. Additionally, how do we help them find the right content at the right time, trust that it’s up-to-date, and find it quickly and easily. 

These five major focus areas are supported by our methodology which is all about creating consistency in the customer experience and providing structure internally to help teams do their jobs well. 

Q. Why is having an enablement roadmap important? 

Taryn: As the saying goes, “if you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail.” I think about the enablement roadmap as a framework to help guide the work that you’re doing and keep the team focused on priorities and whatever it is that you’ve set out to achieve. The enablement roadmap should be informed by the conversations that you have with the team and leadership, and be based on an understanding of the challenges, pain points and opportunities, and where enablement can make the biggest impact. The enablement roadmap serves to help map your progress, but it’s also for getting leadership and the broader team on the same page. It’s important to leave a little bit of room for flexibility because with fast-growing companies, there’s always a lot of change. 

Q. Can you walk us through your process?

Taryn: Enablement roadmap development happens in five stages. The first stage is conducting a needs assessment. I need to determine where the challenges and pain points are, and what opportunities exist at the department, team, and individual level. I tend to have a lot of one-on-one conversations and focus groups with people at all levels. I have a set of questions I typically ask tied to each focus area.

The next step is summarizing. Once I’ve conducted the assessment, I review my notes and summarize the key themes. After summarizing the themes, I map the feedback into two charts, a frequency chart (how often did I hear this) and a severity chart (what should be prioritized). Then, I determine what effort is required by the enablement team to solve a problem or address an issue, and what the impact will be on the business. The quick wins are low-effort, high-impact, and the charts help you visualize what takes priority. We’re a team of two at Plaid, so we have to ruthlessly prioritize our work. 

Next, I populate the roadmap. My enablement roadmap template is very basic. I use Excel and there are a number of key columns I include. This document becomes a project tracker for our team to use throughout the quarter. The last step is to share the roadmap draft with leadership for review and sign off. 

Q. What’s the best way to present the results of the needs assessment?

Taryn: It depends on your company culture, but my leadership team prefers an Excel spreadsheet versus putting the roadmap into slides. We are also a culture of commenting in Docs, so I often gather input that way as well. Sharing an Excel Doc enables everyone to add their feedback in comments, especially if we weren’t able to gather it all during a live review meeting. I also try to use existing channels, such as bi-weekly revenue leadership meetings or regular meetings with various leaders to socialize the enablement roadmap and continue to gather input. 

Q. What are some lessons learned from building out your enablement roadmaps? 

Taryn: The first lesson is that you need to over-communicate with leaders. Make sure that they are a part of the needs assessment experience, and ask them to nominate people on their teams for additional input. This ensures buy-in from the start and hopefully helps them understand the value that enablement can provide. Another lesson is that enablement is a balance between proactive and reactive work. The enablement roadmap outlines proactive work that everyone is aligned on, but in fast-growing organizations, things will pop up constantly that may require you to adjust your roadmap. If your business is changing things frequently, you may need to do a needs assessment more regularly. And finally, don’t try to shove a square peg in a round hole! Make sure that you understand what makes the most sense for the business and for your teams.

More Information

WorkRamp’s partnership with Plaid is just one example of how we’re helping enablement teams deliver outstanding revenue enablement programs. Visit our customer testimonials page to learn why market-leading organizations such as Box, Iterable, and Reddit choose to partner with WorkRamp for effective enablement.