4 Key Steps to Building a Realistic Roadmap for DAM Growth

Once you’ve identified the most pressing areas of need and recognized your strengths, you can effectively chart a path from where you are to where you'd like to be. For many of us, the ideal state seems distant or even unattainable. 

The key focus, however, is on sustained progress and a consistent return on investment that can be clearly communicated to organizational leadership. Over time, leaders will recognize the value of DAM and, ideally, your program will mature alongside increased investment in it.

To justify more investment, you need a detailed plan outlining how you’ll get from Point A (where you are) to Point B (where you want to be). Kristi generously shared her method of building this kind of DAM roadmap, which helped her organize tasks, align with other parts of the company, and make the best use of her limited resources. 

1. Align your DAM Program with the Organization

According to Kristi, the first step in building a DAM roadmap is to align the DAM program with the broader goals of the organization. The key to achieving proper alignment, in terms of where the DAM program is headed, is building connections across your organization. These include end-users, other product or system owners, stakeholders from important business units, and IT. These connections will help you identify priorities, and issues that need to be resolved, map workflows, and determine if/when an integration must occur between systems.

Another important component of an aligned roadmap is assigning roles and responsibilities for both the daily management of the DAM program and the steps outlined in your maturity plan. For organizations with a small team, this should be fairly easy. However, if you have a large team, be sure there is constant communication among members and that responsibilities are clearly defined. If you need people to take on specific roles within your roadmap, be sure this is clearly explained and well documented.

If you don’t align your DAM roadmap with organizational goals, you’ll compete with other departments for limited resources and clash with stakeholders over their roles. This slows down progress and makes it much harder to execute your roadmap effectively. A lack of alignment can also result in setting the wrong destination, causing your DAM program to mature into something that delivers less value instead of more. 

2. Set S-M-A-R-T DAM Goals

Once you’ve established solid connections with the rest of the organization, you can map out your DAM growth path more tactically and with greater detail. Start by defining what success looks like in the short term—the next year or so, not the five-year plan. Using the maturity model as a guide, what’s the next step in your DAM journey? 

This “ideal end state” shouldn’t be just a single statement, but several goals that define what you want your DAM program to look like, accomplish, and improve. For those who work in a corporate setting, SMART Goals are a familiar concept—they can be applied to DAM too! SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. 

These goals serve as the North Star for your roadmap. Every subsequent task, activity, and discussion that follows should align directly back to one of these goals, with deadlines and assigned owners also connected to them. 

3. Document Your Roadmap

Documenting and monitoring your roadmap and goals will keep you on track and provide an easy visual to share with anyone asking about the status of the DAM program. This documentation should take two forms: a nice-looking, on-brand visual snapshot for those not directly involved, and a more dynamic format for you and your team to use to track daily progress. 

Below we’ve attached an example of the more aesthetically pleasing format to help you begin creating your own. For the more dynamic version, we recommend translating your roadmap, goals, and their associated tasks into a project management tool. 

A project management tool provides a quick overview of the status of your projects and initiatives.  It also helps you track governance tasks and maintenance-related activities, ensuring you stay on top of duties such as taxonomy edits, asset ingestion, user management, and data cleanup. 

4. Measure Success and Make Changes

Tracking your goals and progress will help you when you need to showcase what the DAM program has accomplished over a specific period and summarize the progress you’ve made. The important thing to focus on is your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Essentially, every goal should be measurable in a specific and tactile way. Many DAM platforms offer robust analytics features that allow you to quickly generate reports and access the data you need. 

As we mentioned earlier, Kristi tracks key metrics such as logins, downloads, searches, uploads, and shares to track the high-level health of the DAM program. For many growth goals, several of these data points are combined to show whether or not her efforts have been successful. 

Based on this data, you can constantly review and adjust your goal. Things can change very quickly in any organization, so it’s important to be flexible and re-prioritize as your organization’s needs change.