Objective Tagging: The Balanced Scorecard
Turning Strategy into Everyday Product Choices
Executives love declaring “strategy is everyone’s job,” yet day-to-day backlogs rarely resemble the glossy vision deck. Robert Kaplan and David Norton’s Balanced Scorecard (BSC)—published in Harvard Business Review in 1992—offered a remedy: measure performance through four complementary perspectives so that no single KPI blindsides the company. Product teams can apply the same lens by tagging roadmap items Financial, Customer, Internal Process, or Learning & Growth—making the link between ticket and strategy painfully obvious (or obviously missing).
I personally love a balanced scorecard - I’ve spent 20 years running my own balanced scorecard to manage large Product & Engineering teams. If you’re a CTO/CPO/CTPO I’d recommend building one… not because the artifact itself is necessarily helpful, but to keep yourself honest and focused. See below for my additional tips.
Revisiting the Four Lenses
- Financial – Does the work improve revenue, margin, or cost structure?
- Customer – Will it delight the target segment relative to competitors?
- Internal Process – Does it streamline operations or quality?
- Learning & Growth – Does it ready the organisation for future change (skills, culture, data)?
Kaplan and Norton argued that lagging indicators (financial) must pair with leading ones (customer satisfaction, innovation capacity) or strategy gets myopic.
When running large Product & Engineering teams, I’ve developed some additional categories that I think are helpful:
Regulatory Environment runs all the way from the top to the bottom of the scorecard. Depending on the business, it’s really important to break apart the time and focus we spend in this area
Culture sits right at the bottom, underpinning everything else. We have to be INTENTIONAL ABOUT OUR CULTURE and recognise that almost everything we do shapes culture (and that “Culture is shaped by the worst behaviours that a manager will tolerate”).
Break Internal Process into Secure & Private, Process, Great Tech and People & Structure. I want to ensure that each of these gets dedicated focus and they help me to balance my scorecard. YMMV.
Why Product Roadmaps Drift from Strategy
Most backlogs emerge from sales escalation, regulatory deadlines, or charismatic pet projects—none map neatly to the scorecard. Without explicit tags, quarterly planning devolves into local optimisations. BSC tagging diffuses that tunnel vision by forcing debate on which perspective a feature advances and how.
Tagging Workflow in RoadmapOne
- Exclusive Tag Set – “BSC Perspective” with the four lenses.
- One Tag Rule – Every epic must pick its primary lens; secondary goals move to acceptance criteria.
- Heat-Map View – RoadmapOne’s matrix widget shows rows (perspectives) by columns (quarters), spotlighting imbalance.
Practical Examples
| Perspective | Example Epic | KPI |
|---|---|---|
| Financial | “Usage-based pricing engine” | Gross margin ↑ |
| Customer | “Accessibility: WCAG 2.2 compliance” | NPS ↑ |
| Internal Process | “Auto-rollback deploys” | MTTR ↓ |
| Learning & Growth | “LLM hack-week experiment” | % staff in upskilling cohort ↑ |
The last category often feels soft until a CTO ties it to employee retention costs—suddenly Learning & Growth becomes a financial lever, closing the circle.
Case Story: MedTech Scale-Up “CardioCloud”
CardioCloud’s board feared an FDA audit more than churn, skewing dev work toward compliance. Tagging the next two quarters revealed 62 % Internal Process, 28 % Customer, 10 % Financial, 0 % Learning & Growth. The CEO used the heat-map to unlock a 15 % capacity ring-fence for Learning & Growth—AI diagnostics prototypes now in pilot, delighting investors hunting for growth.
Linking BSC Tags to OKRs
OKRs answer “how much this quarter?”; BSC tags answer “why at all?” Tie each key result to its perspective, and CFOs can verify resource spend aligns with strategic weighting: e.g., 40 % Financial, 30 % Customer, 20 % Internal, 10 % Learning.
Board Conversations Simplified
Instead of grappling with 230 features, directors see a four-bar stack:
- Q3 Forecast: Financial 27 %, Customer 25 %, Internal 38 %, Learning 10 %
- Strategy Target: 30 / 30 / 25 / 15
Instantly, they question the 13-pt Internal overweight and ask whether to accelerate monetisation work—exactly the strategic debate a CPO craves.
Avoiding Common Pitfalls
- Tagging Everything Financial – If every epic supposedly drives revenue, none provide leading indicators. Enforce narrative: how will an accessibility upgrade spur revenue?
- Ignoring Learning & Growth – Easy to downplay in cost-cutting cycles, yet capability decay silently compounds. Ring-fence at least 10 %.
The Big Payoff
Balanced Scorecard tagging upgrades “strategy communication” from a once-a-year slide ritual to a live portfolio control system. In RoadmapOne, the friction to tag is seconds, the strategic clarity is priceless.