1.3 Product vision
A good product vision will pull your team toward your future state. It eliminates ambiguity by imagining and defining your future, and the guardrails to get there.
“If you are working on something that you are excited about, you don’t have to be pushed. The Vision pulls you.” — Steve Jobs
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to always feel pulled into the future, pulled toward an aspirational goal and future state? If you can paint that picture, it becomes the vision around which the whole team will rally.
Introduction
Your vision statement defines your future. It sets in place your aspirations, but also your boundaries. It clearly sets the goal we are striving to get to. It defines your shared vision of the future state, and is the unifier around which your team rallies. And, it elevates the team to think beyond preconceptions and perceived limitations.
Practically speaking, it sets down an overarching long term direction for your product and serves as a reminder for all involved stakeholders. Your vision statement should define why you are creating the product, and what your company’s intended outcome is.
A vision can be concise, like Kahn Academy’s: “To provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.” I love concise vision statements. It’s easy to digest and imagine.
Sometimes they’re more involved, like Google’s: “To remain a place of incredible creativity and innovation that uses our technical expertise to tackle big problems and invest in moonshots like artificial intelligence research and quantum computing.” If we dissect that a little bit, we see these elements in Google’s vision statement:
Incredible creativity and innovation
Technical expertise
Big problems
Invest in moonshots
It describes a place of “creativity and innovation,” supporting the creation of ideas and solutions that the company can develop. It also establishes technical expertise as a goal that the business organization needs. And it directs the company to solve big problems with moonshots within the global community. Google’s long term goals of developing and providing IT-based solutions that benefit the world is made clear with this relatively simple statement. It becomes their operating system.
Regardless of where you start, your vision statement can be refined over time. We’ll walk through an exercise to define a clear product vision that includes all of the elements we need to define our team’s rallying call.
Recognize that your product vision needs to fit with your corporate mission. A vision and a mission are distinct and different, but must be compatible. Google’s mission describes operations for providing useful information: “Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It supports the vision. You can think of the vision as the “what,” and the mission more akin to the “why.”
Your vision is your visceral description of where you want to go. It’s not a plan of how to get there — it’s a statement of your future state.
The power of a clear vision
Your product vision makes your destination solid and imaginable. It eliminates ambiguity by defining the future.
It’s not a strategy, a plan, or a mission — those come later. It’s your definition of what the team is striving for, and it should be transparent, definite, and distinct.
I can’t stress enough how important it is to get your product vision right. It’s your visceral criteria of success. If your vision is wrong, your whole product is at risk and can go off the rails as your team gets distracted by disparate ideas about what the future will look like.
I’ve seen teams launch a project with no clear vision statement. It has always ended poorly. You can probably imagine the outcomes: Different stakeholders with different ideas about the future. Each is pulling in their own direction, often creating competing silos or defending individual interests. The result can be fragmented at best, delivering a poorly thought out product; or it leads to complete failure as time and effort is wasted on myriad competing concerns.
Your product vision should create unity of purpose. A good vision statement:
Creates a common purpose and direction for the team.
Creates alignment across the team, customer, stakeholders and organization.
Validates your purpose with your customer or end users.
Puts attention on the “art of the possible,” avoiding arbitrary or preconceived limitations (such as technical or current state definitions).
Creates a rallying point where the team and stakeholders can re-establish their focus and direction, avoiding “drift.”
Sets overarching priorities.
Helps define (and is a required input into) a clear roadmap by directing the team toward a specific future state.
These benefits create unity of purpose and maintain that unity over time. The vision statement can serve as a checkpoint, reminding the team to ask, “Are we doing the right thing?”
The bottom line is that it helps build a better product.
Defining an effective product vision can be a bit challenging. You have to distill everything that everyone believes the product can be into a succinct, very clear, very unambiguous statement. I’m going to guide you on what’s worked for me time and again. Let’s get started:
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