How to Use Milestone Mapping to Chart a Path for Startup Growth

When creating a business plan for your startup, knowing where you’re going and how you’ll get there is what makes your plan compelling to investors and other stakeholders. One way to do that is to utilize milestone mapping throughout. 

Milestone mapping is a strategic tool that helps you take your big-picture goals and turn them into actionable objectives. Having these milestones planned or mapped not only provides structure and clarity, but it also builds your startup’s momentum by illustrating what has to happen in order to be successful.

According to Wayne Embree, MS, an experienced seed-stage investor, Senior Advisory Partner at Rev1 Ventures, and co-founder of Reference Capital Management, milestones serve two purposes—first, to ensure the plan reflects what is realistically achievable with the capital and resources at hand and second, to build investor confidence. “Generic milestones or those borrowed from industry reports rarely help a company execute. Tailored, well-defined milestones do both—they guide execution and demonstrate credibility.”

Cure spoke with investment and entrepreneurship experts to explore how to create milestones that will guide your progress, communicate your vision, keep you focused, and help you measure success at critical steps along the way.

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What Is Milestone Mapping and Why Is It Important?

According to Embree, milestone mapping is a way for startups to chart the critical steps they plan to accomplish over a defined period. For some sectors, like those in biopharma, milestones are often stage-dependent, aligned with pre-clinical work, IND-enabling studies, and clinical development, he said.

“Investors and strategic partners pay close attention to how a team articulates milestones, explains the rationale behind them, and adapts when delays occur,” said Embree. “Missed milestones are normal; what matters is how the team communicates, recalibrates, and continues to advance.”

Milestones should also be woven throughout the business plan rather than confined to a single section, added Embree. “Each function, whether product development, regulatory strategy, or commercialization, should include milestones that reflect progress in that area. Integrating milestones across sections shows investors that the plan is coordinated, realistic, and aligned with available resources.”

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Benefits of Milestone Mapping

When you’re creating a business in the healthcare or life sciences sector, you will be addressing development timelines, regulatory requirements when applicable, and funding needs. When used effectively, milestone mapping can help you break down this journey into manageable phases that keep your business on track and moving forward, said Gregory Chandler Ray, PhD, MBA, an angel investor, instructor in the National Science Foundation I-Corps program, and the Don and Margi Berens Professor of Entrepreneurship at Cornell SC Johnson School of Business. 

Here are some key benefits of milestone mapping:

• Provides regulatory clarity: Aligning your milestones with FDA or other regulatory approval timelines communicates you understand what is ahead of you.

• Boosts potential investor confidence: Establishing milestones allows you to demonstrate traction and progress with clear, evidence-based objectives.

• Allocates resources: Milestone mapping also allows you to use time and funding efficiently based on your key checkpoints.

• Mitigates risk: Milestone mapping helps you identify potential obstacles early and adjust your strategy before major setbacks occur.

• Communicates logic: Your milestones demonstrate how you are going to logically get to critical points so that you advance your business.

Effective milestone mapping can help you put together a logical business plan, said Ray. “I’m not an advocate for a long, written business plan. I care about the logic of it. I’m looking for the logic of the investment and the logic of the entrepreneur.”

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How to Determine Your Milestones and Break Them Into Achievable Objectives

Key milestones in healthcare and life sciences typically align with regulatory requirements. For example, companies developing a drug, diagnostic, device, or digital therapeutic may include pre-clinical phases, IND-enabling studies, clinical trial stages, and regulatory submissions, said Embree. 

Each milestone should define the scope, expected duration, required funding, and importance to the overall progress. This level of detail demonstrates that the team understands the resources, risks, and timeline needed to succeed, he said.

“When I’m thinking about milestone mapping, I'm really [asking] what are the stages of development and what are those inflection points or discontinuities along the journey that can signal that we have advanced our business,” explained Ray. “Milestone mapping is the plan for de-risking the business and creating the signposts that signal to investors and other stakeholders that the business is less risky because of having met certain milestones.”

According to Embree and Ray, your milestones should:

• Identify what can realistically be achieved with current staffing and funding as well as what type of funding you need to continue to grow.

• Incorporate key submission, approval, or compliance milestones that illustrate an understanding of industry standards.

• Align with your data collection needs such as focus groups, validation studies, pilot programs, or early-stage clinical data.

• Communicate next steps and provide investors with a roadmap beyond the first stage.

• Demonstrate partnership potential by highlighting stages where collaboration, funding, or licensing opportunities may arise.

You also should include any letters of intent that you have received, said Ray. “Letters of intent actually are one of the best milestones, because they are great evidence that you have a value proposition that resonates without having to actually have made the sale or made the product.”

They also can be used to help you establish your milestones because they often contain a performance metric that you need to achieve in order to secure a partnership or funding, he said. “Securing letters of intent is an incredibly good use of your time in terms of understanding reasonable milestones; and they also serve as an indicator for your startup’s perceived value.”

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Best Practices and Common Pitfalls

The most effective milestones are grounded in reality. They also earn investor confidence, demonstrate intellectual honesty, and position your startup for long-term success, said Embree. Key best practices include:

• Planning realistically: Focus on what can be achieved with available or reasonably expected resources, said Embree.

• Talking to others: Setting milestones requires talking to customers, stakeholders, partners, and so on to complete the ethnographic work required, said Ray.

• Refraining from using gut intuition: Base your business plan and your milestones on market research, data, discovery, analysis, and validation, said Ray.

• Validating assumptions: Confirm timelines and costs with vendors, advisors, and experts, and build contingencies for potential delays, said Embree.

• Separating tasks from objectives: Tasks to achieve a milestone are not the same as a milestone, said Ray. Your milestones should be time bound and measurable.

• Supporting your plan with evidence: Milestones should reflect demonstrated capabilities and experience, not wishful thinking, said Embree.

• Adapting your milestones as needed: Every six to eight weeks, set a session for objective setting and hold yourself accountable to two or three primary objectives, suggested Ray.

Also, don’t wait for investors to tell you what your milestones should be, Ray added. Know your business better than your investor and be able to explain why you set your milestones in the way that you did, he said.

“Milestones aren’t just what feels right to the entrepreneur, but also have to work in the context of this business resonating out in the market,” said Ray. “Milestone mapping is effective when you have an understanding of the market you’re going into and the people in the market making the decisions.”