Roadmap Workshop
Advice With No Stake in What You Build
Why Crop Fertility Services brought in an outside partner to test its tech roadmap, and chose off-the-shelf tools over custom software.
The Challenge
Crop Fertility Services (CFS) is a growing fertility and manure services company. 2026 was a record year, and leadership has set an aggressive three year growth plan. Yet the business ran on Google Sheets, Pipedrive, QuickBooks, a custom Glide app, and a handful of other tools, with limited integration between systems.
Everyone knew things had to change. Arlen Stark, CFO, owned the job of figuring out the company's tech roadmap. CFS had already developed an initial technology strategy. What Arlen wanted was independent validation of it, along with alignment and buy-in from the broader team. CFS had previously walked away from one custom ERP effort, so the cost of choosing wrong wasn't hypothetical.
If you lead a nonprofit or ed-tech company, this may sound familiar: a lean team, a patchwork of tools, and a big decision about whether to build, buy, or wait.
What We Did
We ran our Roadmap Workshop over two weeks in August 2026. We interviewed eight of CFS's roughly 16 employees, from the CEO and COO to the newest salesperson. We documented more than 30 recurring themes and brought the top six back to the team, including manual data entry between disconnected systems, a strong desire to "enter it once," and too much knowledge living with one person.
Then the team prioritized together, sorting ideas by how aligned they were and how confident they felt. A clear preference came out of that work: connected, off-the-shelf platforms over a custom ERP or a CFS-owned application. The roadmap named HubSpot as the leading CRM candidate to validate and set the more specialized integrations aside for later.
We didn't walk in with a build to sell, which made it easier to follow the evidence.
“You didn't have a bias towards whether or not we did the work with you or went a different direction.”
The Deliverable
What a Roadmap Workshop Leaves Behind
In product work, a roadmap is a phased plan of outcomes, and the decisions between them, laid out over time. Ours is a hosted document your team can open, share, and download as a PDF. It has three parts. The Story describes where the organization wants to be in a few years, the themes from our research, and how the team prioritized them. The Roadmap starts with the assumptions behind the plan, sorted into what's decided, what has strong direction, what still needs validating, and what's deferred. Then it lays out overlapping phases with rough month ranges. The Summary lists the decisions leadership needs to align on and the next steps.
A multi-phase plan isn't a commitment to every phase. Each phase starts only after the team has evaluated the one before it, so the plan can change as you learn. For CFS, the roadmap gave the team a shared picture to rally around, and it helped build alignment for the HubSpot implementation that followed.
The Result
CFS left with a clear roadmap and a team that agreed on where to go. Arlen said CFS had needed that kind of direction for over a year.
CFS then ran its own due diligence. Leadership voted unanimously for HubSpot, and implementation started in October with an implementation partner. They didn't hire us for the next phase, and that's fine. Arlen is clear that the workshop didn't make the decision for them. It gave them focus.
“It helped us build buy-in across the team rather than simply making a decision at the leadership level.”
“…you gave everybody a seat at the table, everybody's voice was heard, and it created that alignment and buy-in that was missing.”
Arlen Stark, CFO, Crop Fertility Services
Not every Roadmap Workshop ends in custom software. Every one should end with a direction your team believes in.
In their own words
Weighing build vs. buy, or not sure where to start?
Our Roadmap Workshop gives you two active weeks of listening, research, and prioritization before anyone commits to a build. If it would help to talk it through, we're happy to chat.