Product Vision & Strategy in a Nutshell
Last week, I talked about my personal aspire as to why I’m interested in product management. Now, I’m gonna continue with my first chapter about product management, which is vision and strategy.
Why is vision important?
Vision is your aspiration, your energy and driver. Vision is what push you to accomplish what you wanted to be. It’s your dream! Dream big and make it happen! Just like a company who has big vision about how their company wanted to be embraced in the industry and their customer, a product also need a vision that allows a product to grow and how a product will be perceived by their customer. Your product vision should give a picture about what your customer could expect when they are using your products because they’re your muse!
Therefore, there are several things you should consider when creating your product vision:
1. Include your customer/user in it
Remember what I said before, your customer is your muse. Therefore, you need to be very considerate about what your customer need and their expectation, but don’t forget about your company/business need, they need money too. So, your product vision should serve both the business and the customer.
2. It should be a stretch, but attainable
Your product vision is your dream about how your product should be like, so you can make your product vision as broad as possible. However, remember that it should be achievable, it should be realistic, and get deep into your product, NOT something like “the best platform”. Try to elaborate it such as “the most reliable”, “the most go-to platform for …”, “the all in one platform”
Be creative guys!
3. Show distinction with the other product that already existed
Do you familiar with this “Most of nowadays big company is not a first-comer in the industry”. Just like Facebook, their service is mostly the same as MySpace or Friendster. But Facebook is the winner (it exists until now). So, your product needs to deliver a distinction with the other, even though maybe you have the same business model/similar service with the other business, you can diversify your customer segment or serve unique values compare to the others which already exists.
4. Look several years ahead!
The market is always constantly changing, therefore your product vision should be valid for several years in the future, it shouldn’t be easy to change. So, give it some room for improvement of your products.
Let’s breakdown our favorite platform’s vision: Yes, Medium!
Medium is a platform where you can publish your writing worldwide and consume any writing content globally regardless their background, whether from an amateur or a professional copywriter/publishing company.
Therefore, the company vision can be arranged into something like this :
“Create a platform where readers find dynamic thinking, and where expert and undiscovered voices can share their writing on any topic.”
Or in high-level of product, you can say basically
“Create a simple blogging experience for anyone!”
Breaking down one of their feature, which is also a form of product, take a sample of
*Your feed recommendations to read
This feature provides you with a lot of recommendation of articles for you to read, based on the topic you chose when creating an account and based on your history of reading/the list of reading you created/the articles you like/search for.
Therefore, the ‘feeds’ product vision can be arranged into something like this:
“Provide the most suitable reading recommendation for the readers based on their persona”
Okay, now that we’ve been discussed the product vision, I want to share with you about product strategy.
What is product strategy?
Product strategy in a nutshell is the “how would you accomplish your product vision?”
Obviously, after you create a vision about how your product should be, after you dream about your product, you also wanted to know how you would make it come true. This is where product strategy is needed, product strategy is the step-by-step to create your product, you can say that the product strategy is the milestones you need to prepare before your product can be launched into the market.
The product strategy helps you decide which problem you need to focus on, basically if you wanted to create an e-commerce, take a sample. You need to collect the seller first, you need to create a platform and the system, which consist of designing, creating the customer journey, make a customer segment, also, you need to partner up with payment provider which enables the customer to pay from any payment method, etc. Because there are many things to work, you need to prioritize which one you should be focused on first, therefore creating a milestone will help you to organize your project. You can read more about product strategy framework in here.
Now, in this section I want to brainstorm with you, well you can leave a comment below about my opinion here.
In my opinion, producing a movie should also consider about vision and strategy, just like a product. Well, movie also a form of product, right?
Before creating a movie or a storyline, you need to deep dive about your customer segment, then from there you can start creating your characters, personality, settings, and plot. Who will you reach as your audience? What’s their main interest/what makes them engage? You need to have a theme of your movie and what you want to deliver from the movie (this is your vision). Then, from there you can conduct your research about your audience, create characters and personality based on the themes and message you want to deliver along the story also should be relevant with nowadays settings, create the plot and settings that will engage with your audience and maybe sprinkle some plot twist on the way as surprise element, so it will keep entertain your audience.
This close our discussion today, if you like what I write here, please let me know and leave some claps/comment. I will keep writing about product management along my studies and probably will doing it every week. Chiao!
How to write a product vision statement | Productboard
Welcome to Medium. Bring Your Stories and Ideas | by Ev Williams | Medium
