How to Build a Digital Roadmap That Leadership Will Actually Fund (with Sam Schwartz) | Ep. 40

Most distributors don't have a digital roadmap. They have a list of projects someone wants to do, a budget fight waiting to happen, and a general sense that they're behind. Kyler Nixon sits down with Sam Schwartz, B2B ecom expert, to walk through a real framework for building one. Sam presented this process at B2BEA in Scottsdale, where the RICE prioritization method she introduced reportedly had every person in the room writing it down. This episode gets into the meat of that: how to actually uncover what customers need, generate ideas worth acting on, attach financial outcomes to those ideas, and then rank them without politics getting in the way.ㅤ📌 What We CoverWhy voice of customer is a spectrum, from five-minute phone calls to Google Analytics, and why you need both ends to make sense of anythingHow to write survey questions that reveal actual customer behavior instead of just confirming what you already believeWhy your technology vendors are an underused idea source, including how asking a Shopify rep for a site audit surfaced features the team didn't know existedHow to build a business case when the ROI is fuzzy, using product data enrichment as a worked exampleWhy presenting conservative, target, and aggressive financial projections is more useful than a single number, especially in front of a leadership teamThe full RICE method (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort): what each variable means, how to score them, and how the formula produces a priority ranking you can actually defendWhy effort scoring should include every team involved, not just ITWhy roadmapping is a cultural activity, and why change management is the part no framework fully solves