The one thing that can make or break your product and team: the vision
In speaking with many product people (PMs, designers, engineers, data scientists) over the last few months — I’ve realized that people use the words mission, vision and strategy interchangeably. Not going to lie — I’ve been guilty of this in the past as well. Wanted to jot down some thoughts on my perspectives on this, and the topic of product vision in general- both to solidify my own thinking and in case it can be helpful to anyone reading this.
Positioning it as a Q&A for readability (and to mix things up a bit)
Mission, vision, strategy — I’ve seen people use some of these words interchangeably; what’s the difference?
To me, mission is the “why” — the purpose behind the product or the company. Why does the product or company exist? Its centered in the here and now
Product vision is all about the future you want to build — Usually there is a quantifiable component as well — which lends itself well to measurement.
To take an example, Amazon’s mission is “We strive to offer our customers the lowest possible prices, the best available selection, and the utmost convenience”
Vision: “To be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online”
Notice that the mission statement is rooted in the present, and speaks to why Amazon exists. The vision talks about the future — where Amazon aims to have anything that customers might want to buy online. The quantifiable component here is around the breadth of product selection (“anything”)
Product strategy: which is another term that often comes up in close proximity to mission and vision statements, is the “how”. How are you going to achieve your vision — what are the imperatives or major bodies of work that you need to take on?
The relationship between mission, vision and strategy is often represented as a pyramid or triangle of some sort. I’ve come up with my own — with a few nuanced takes that I’ve found to be helpful.
The most important take here is that product “vision” includes the vision statement, the product principles, the measurement framework as well as the product strategy. Too often — I think when people think “vision”, they stop at the “vision statement” — which is typically a one sentence articulation of the imagined future. However, to make it real and practical — I think its important to also talk about how you’re going to measure success, what strategies will you deploy to achieve the vision and what principles will you abide by as you do so.
Take a look at Microsoft’s roll-out of their new vision statement (emphasis mine) -
“Microsoft is a technology company whose mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We strive to create local opportunity, growth, and impact in every country around the world. Our strategy is to build best-in-class platforms and productivity services for an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge infused with artificial intelligence (“AI”).”
This is an interesting example of mission, vision and strategy coming together (although there is some blurring of the lines between “mission” and “vision” here — but I don’t really want to get pedantic here; their mission is to achieve their vision)
What are the characteristics of a good product vision?
First and foremost — the product vision should be inspiring. Shipping product is hard work, and in today’s job market, the best product people (PMs, designers, engineers, analysts) have many options. They need to be inspired by their work, and believe that they are part of something truly impactful. The vision statement (the one sentence encapsulation of the vision) is extremely important in this regard — because the vision is something that the product leaders should continue to reinforce / repeat, and the vision statement format makes it easy to do.
Second, good product visions are actionable. A clear understanding of the product vision will allow you to make decisions on prioritization, trade-offs, what to work on and what not to work on. For any hard decision where there are many options and the outcomes uncertain — truing back to what really aligns with and help you achieve the vision is usually a good strategy. In many cases, the product vision and strategy may also help to determine the organization structure of your team (e.g. teams aligned againgst the major elements of the strategy)
And finally, good product visions are measurable. You should be clear on how you can measure progress against the vision. For example — Kindle’s vision is to “make every book, in any language in under 60 seconds”. I think this is a great vision statement in terms of measurability — main KPIs here would be number of titles, and how quickly users can go through the discovery and check-out flow. In some cases — you may need to build the telemetry around the metric. For example — if your product vision involves “lowest price”, then you may need to build a web-crawler to capture data on price of competing products across the web to measure how often you have the lowest price in that category.
Done well, a good product vision can also be an awesome recruiting and retention tool to build a world-class product team.
What are the elements of the product vision?
Good product visions start with an articulation of the problem they’re trying to solve for the customer. Good product visions explain the problem and why its worth solving (validation). Good product visions include the elements I describe above — the vision statement, principles, measurement framework and elements of the strategy. Finally, good product visions help the audience visualize how the future could be different if you achieve your goals (more on tools for this later)
Bad product visions feel like they’re the highest paid person’s opinion vs. something that’s deeply rooted in enduring customer or business problems. Bad product visions feel like they’re pie in the sky ideas — from someone who is trying too hard to be visionary. Bad product visions don’t feel real — either because the visualization element is lacking, or there is no articulation of the strategy on how to achieve goals. Finally, bad product visions aren’t measurable.
(Apologies to Ben Horowitzfor the blatant plagiarism of this format!)
Its still feels daunting — are there any tools to help build the vision?
Here are some tools I’ve used or have seen used effectively for various aspects of the vision
Vision workshop: Personally, the most daunting element for me is the product vision statement — the pithy once sentence articulation of the vision, which is memorable, inspiring, cleverly worded while being an accurate representation of where you want to go. There is a lot riding on getting this right! One tool I’ve seen being used with some success is the product vision workshop. This is a good template for how to run one
Another important aspect of the product vision is to help the audience visualize the final attainment of the vision. A few tools for vision visualization:
- The Amazon press release: arguably the most well known example of a deliberate approach to laying out the vision for the product. More here
- Vision-type: Term coined by Marty Cagan (I believe) — essentially a relatively high fidelity prototype of the ideal / future state product. More on vision-typing here.
- TV ad / product explainer video: Something like Drew Houston’s famous drop-box video; closely related to the vision-type above, maybe slightly different in format
- Experience / vision story: A story-board that illustrates how the user experiences the product. An interesting article on this here
- Experience or journey map: An experience map is a visualization of the end to end experience you want a user to go through as she interacts with you product (or product line).Can also include key customer elements (what you want the user to think/feel/say/do) A journey map is a slightly more specific version of this — focused on a specific moment along the experience. Some great writing on experience maps here — (by Capital One’s very own Adaptive Path!)
- Service blue-print: Commercialized by Capital One’s Adaptive Path team — this is an awesome approach for linking the customer experience (front stage) with the underlying systems and processes that need to be mobilized at each step (the back-stage). The customer experience piece can be the vision for how the user will flow through the ultimate product — while the back-stage piece helps to form the basis of the product strategy i.e. the underlying elements that need to come together to make the vision a reality. More here
What levels of zoom (company vs. product vs. feature?) should you use for product visions?
I’m a firm believer in building the product vision at every level of the product — for the entire product line, for individual products AND for key features within the individual products. Key is to make sure that the goals are aligned and nested with each successive layer in that ladder (like OKRs). The amount of effort you put into illustrating and building out the vision may vary at various levels.
Who should be involved in building the vision?
As you’re building out and selling the product vision — It’s a great opportunity to collaborate with key design and engineering leaders. If they’re bought in from the start — and feel like defining the vision has been a joint effort, their levels of ownership and commitment will be much higher.
OK — I’m done defining the vision, how do I think about the MVP and the roadmap?
The key is the understand the riskiest elements of the strategy and try to validate them first. I’ve written in detail about this methodology here
All views, opinions and statements are my own
