How we did Product Vision at Flyt

There’s plenty of great articles and books out there on the benefits of having a great product vision. (here, and here, and here).

But product vision is a lot like great parenting. Everyone talks about it, says you must absolutely do it well, but when pushed — no one knows exactly how to go about it.

So we wanted to break the mould. We wanted to talk about “How”.

What we have to add to the community is a real story from the trenches, on how we defined and shared product vision with the folks inside and outside of Flyt.

We’re super proud of how it all turned out. The circumstances might not apply. We hope it serves you.

Our Product Vision

Our 3 Act Product Vision — Flyt team

At Flyt we’re building a 3 Act Product Vision.

• We’re starting with “The Hub”, seamlessly connecting venues serving food & drinks to the 100s of apps that customers love, all through one Universal award winning API.
• We’ll build on that, and follow by architecting “The Marketplace”, where Services and Venues get to work together, in minutes not months, so they both get more customers.
• Our peak will be to bring the world what we called “The Universal Platform”, a platform as essential as the internet, connecting any type of Bricks & Mortar venues in the world, to the very crazy possibilities of technology, making every customer experience profoundly better.

For us, product vision is primarily a communication tool. This means out of all the things it must do for us, it must be easy to share, understand and pass around. We also wanted it to be a focus tool. This meant we wanted it to show up in conversations and help us frame scope and avoid premature optimisation.

We hope you enjoy reading about our journey.

Step 0 — Hit refresh

We started by doing a reset of expectations with the entire company. We wanted to go back to first principles and build shared understanding on what vision is, why we should have one here at Flyt, and what kind of format it should hold if it is to be useful for us.

We decided to put some slides together, and gather the entire company for a 30 minute Lunch & Learn (a presentation over lunch, slides here). We didn’t come up with the concepts on the presentation, instead, we leveraged some of the best thinking in the world around the topic and relied heavily on the lessons learned from those who’ve done this journey before us (here, and here).

People loved ❤️ this lunch & learn. One reason they loved it so much is that vision — as a concept — transcends product, in a way that it touches people and their personal life’s. It touches those that have been blessed with a vision and those that have yet to find it. Folks get it. “It’s about saving the city, not digging a hole”. At a very human level, folks know that having something that connects the dots for us moving forward is absolutely necessary. Most of us crave it. It’s who we are.

But we believe there was another reason folks got to love it so much. Something we actually planned from the beginning and didn’t want to leave to chance.

We wanted to introduce a topic that is fundamental for any vision exercise. We wanted to talk about 🌤 Faith.

Oh, eye roll! We know - as with many of the folks at the lunch & learn, the first reaction to hearing about faith (in the context of business) was a long, pronounced, dismayingly obvious eye roll 🙄.

That’s because business and engineering are all about the numbers. All about the facts. That’s fair — we agree. But there’s a secret 🍭 delicious superpower hidden in the often abandoned, often forgotten concept of Faith. A superpower you MUST use if your vision is to ever be successful.

That superpower is to act with expectancy. When you act with expectancy you trust that something will happen, and act like it’s going to, while holding reality top of mind.

You see, any vision you cast MUST have expectancy. Otherwise it’s just a plan. Think about it — if nothing outside of your control needs to come together for the reality you’ll describe to come true, you need a plan, not a vision. This concept is so fundamental for us, we wanted everyone to buy into it from the very beginning. Even before we did anything of our own.

Folks loved it. Most left the session thinking: “Maybe it IS true. Maybe having something other than a plan is useful after all. Expectancy, what a funny word”.

The session was a hit refresh moment for all of us. We needed it. We could now start this journey by knowing that everyone had points of reference for what a good vision is, how it’s meant to help and what attributes it should hold that distinguish it from a plan.

We hit refresh. We were ready to go.

The whole process, at a glance

After the refresh, we moved on to a 3 stage process that outlines our entire approach to casting Product Vision.

Here are the stages, at a glance, along with what they’re meant to do, how we’ll roughly go about it and who we involved at each stage:

1. Define. The “Define” stage was all about shared understanding. Understanding of what’s on everyone’s minds, and how that’s anchored to the customer, the market, the technological trends and the world (20% of time)
2. Charge. The “Charge” stage was all about turning the dial on the words we had so far, making them powerful, expectant and inspirational. (20% of time)
3. Make it stick. The “Make it stick” stage was all about making our product vision stick with the conversations of the every day and the minds of the makers in our company. (60% of time)

You may notice something odd. We made it so that the “Make it stick” stage is about 60% of the entire work. That’s because we fundamentally believe great product vision is a communication problem. And any communication problem requires sets & reps if you ever hope to make it stick.

So, whatever you end up with, no matter how good it is, will fade away if you don’t “make it stick”. In fact, we believe this so much, we know it’s best to have vision that’s not perfect yet but sticky, than vision that’s perfect but hard to tell a friend. This principle — that sticky is better than perfect — is something we applied pervasively throughout all the stages of this process, and one that served us well.

The entire process took about 1 month (from stage 1 to first activity of stage 3) for us. So it doesn’t need to be long or complicated.

Roll up your sleeves, let’s get into the details.

Stage 1. Define — Getting to First Draft

Our “Define” stage was designed to build shared understanding. Understanding of what’s on everyone’s minds, how that’s anchored to the customer and how the trends of the territory we’re in play a role (the market, technology and world trends).

Here’s what we did:

1. 1:1 interviews with the founders. We started our “Define” stage with a set of 1:1 interviews with each founder. The objective was to understand what the current thinking was, and what were some of the beliefs behind those ideas. You can find the scripts here. We documented everything in Google Docs, and moved on to the next stage.
2. Workshop to map our value proposition. We then ran one, three hour workshop. Anyone that wanted could attend. Most of our leadership team did. This workshop used the Value Proposition Canvas to map our current beliefs about our customers and how we bring value to them. We are in a multi sided market, which meant we had lots of customers, lots of contexts, so lots of canvases to fill. We started by identifying the customers, alongside with a couple of the key contexts for each of them, and proceeded to map the jobs, pains, gains, proposition, gain creators and pain relievers for each one. You can find more about the process in the Value Proposition Design book here. The result of the workshop was that we collectively discussed our beliefs about who the customers are, why they hire us and how we bring them value.
3. Request to subject matter experts on World, Market and Technology trends. We then followed by requesting the subject matter experts inside our company for a 1-page list of trends in three areas (think bullet points, not essays). World Trends, Technology Trends and Market Trends. Our subject matter experts asked us for a list of prompter questions, so here is what we used. We asked them to answer this in a 5–10 year timeframe. Each result was put on Google Slides and we moved on to the next activity of this stage.

At this point you must be thinking, well that’s a lot of information. We have rooms full of value proposition canvases, pages of interviews, conjectures about the future of the world, technology and the market. All so we can do what?

Well, the answer lies in trusting how your brain works to come up with new ideas. Actually it’s more than trust, it’s science (here).

Here’s what we did:

• Walk away from it. If there’s one thing you must know about creativity is that to come up with good ideas, you MUST allow your brain to first ingest lots of information and then let it rest completely away from the problem. Vision casting is a big chunky creative exercise. You’re going to have to use your imagination and visual thinking. So after producing and reading all the information, the best next step was to actually move away from it all. To go do something else. For days. Personally, I went for a walk in the woods in Wales with my family. Whenever a new idea came to mind, I used the iOS Notes app to write it down, listing over 300 lines of possible vision statements.
• Keep unity of voice. The other important part of this last step, was something our CEO mentioned — great visions need unity of voice. This meant that at this stage, it was best if one person (rather than a large group) takes ownership of trying to refine the concept. This rang true, mainly because doing otherwise would ensure group-think, meaning a diluted, weak, unemotional and uninspiring statement. So we reduced the original group to only the founders and myself (as VP of Product) from this point on. As the VP of Product, I would provide unity of voice, and work with the founders to review and refine).
• Talk like a real person. This may sound obvious, but the world is full of business-speak. Sometimes we write and say thinks at work that we would have a hard time explaining to the person next to us on the bus. We use words like synergy and empowerment and big data and cloud. Why is that? The opposite is what we called “talking like a real person”. Talking like a person feels real. And people crave real. It gives statements power. It also gives them rhythm. Kind of like music. For example, making sentences in groups of three makes reading such sentences easier, clearer and more fun. Words are spoken with emphasis. Some words flow way better than others. The rule of thumb here is to try to say something out loud. It should have rhythm. The person next to you on the bus should be able to get it. That, or hire a good copy writer.
• Default to incomplete. Another principle we followed was to “default to incomplete”. Many, many times the temptation of “adding more detail” showed up. “But that’s not the whole story, it’s more than that” was something we said out loud. A lot. Well, we learned (the hard way) that this was by design. We had to “default to incomplete”. Otherwise the statements would loose power. Otherwise vision, as a tool, would not have the effect we wanted anymore. We decided that we cared less about the completeness of a vision statement, and we cared more about it’s stickiness. So we cut out all the generic words. We decided to fall in love with “specific” because we wanted Product Vision to be tool that was useful for us, more than we wanted to be right.

We reduced the number of vision candidates from the 300 or so we listed originally, down to a Top 10. We just shared them on slack, tried them with customers at events, with friends at parties, and with each other at work. We kept editing, ruthlessly.

Stage 2. Charge — Give your vision power

In this second stage we wanted to pick the top 10 ideas we drafted and turn the dial up for inspiration, expectancy and direction. The goal of this stage is to bring more power, clarity and direction to the statements we prepared before.

To do this stage, we run both formal and informal workshops. Here’s the outline of what we did:

1. Start by explaining the 3 levers and listing some prompter questions. Lever 1. Expectancy. Can we change the ambition so what needs to happen makes us uncomfortable? Lever 2. Inspiration. Can we change some words so that it’s made more inspirational? Are there common words that we can replace by more powerful ones? Can it be made shorter? What is the twitter version of this? Lever 3. Direction. Can we make the statement more specific, less specific, more about a part of the problem, more about a characteristic of the problem?
2. Give each person some post its and a sharpie, and in silence for 10 minutes, metaphorically turn each dial up to 11. Do it one lever at a time.
3. If it helps, tell the group to pick one of the vision statements, identify which level it’s currently at for one of the levers (say it’s a 3 in inspiration), and ask themselves what would the next level (what does a 4 in inspiration sound like, what about a 5, a 6, et al)
4. After each person is done with the freelist, ask them to choose the top 3 and say them out loud.
5. Notice and take note for any emotional reaction from the group

If anything you’ll get some interesting words, metaphors, rhythms and ways of looking at the problem that you didn’t had before. That’s why it’s important to involve folks around you that express themselves differently than the group you’ve had so far.

In our example at Flyt, this is where we found we wanted our vision to be in 3 Acts. We immediately identified that there were different timelines at play, and that by providing direction we could increase expectancy and inspiration much easily. So we did exactly that.

At the end of this stage, we had a clear picture of what our 3 act vision looked like. We spent more time word smithing, but forced ourselves to have a deadline we would present this vision by.

We presented it on ONE slide to the entire Flyt company, by using a visual metaphor of mountain-climbing, at a all-hands company offsite.

Stage 3. Make it stick — It’s hard work!

The final, but most important stage, is all about the sets & reps of communication.

It’s about making sure that folks inside and outside Flyt actually commit into their memory our product vision, in a way that makes them sing it in conversations that happen everyday, with their peers, with their friends. We wanted this to be more than an intellectual exercise. We wanted it to resonate with their hearts.

At this point, most people expect us to reveal a secret technique to making vision stick. The truth his, the how of this part is easy (we outline it below). The execution is the hard part. You can use our ideas, or build your own. That’s not what matters. What matters is that you follow through and do the work.

At Flyt we used the metaphor of an inverted pyramid 🔻 (first heard this from Frank Blake, Home Depot CEO). In the inverted pyramid, the CEO is at the bottom, followed by the leadership team, and the employees are all the way at the top. This makes sense, in a servant leadership situation. But it makes a lot of sense when you consider that the force of gravity, in such situation, is not enough to get your ideas to flow through. In the inverted pyramid, you’re actually working against gravity, so you must work harder to get ideas to stick.

Here’s what we did:

1. Gathered ideas by free listing. Gathered HR, UX and product for a 2h workshop to generate ideas on how to make vision stick. We used free listing, post its and sharpies.
2. Prioritised in effort and impact. We then prioritised those initiatives in a 2x2 matrix of effort and impact. This was very subjective. But we’re ok with that. We choose the quick wins as candidates to go first (low effort, high impact).
3. Modelled against an influence model. We used a model to frame those ideas in the best way possible so they would stick. There’s plenty of those, but we like the 6 sources of influence model. In this model at least 4 of the social, personal, structural elements of ability and motivation need to be present for an idea to stick. So after everyone was done free listing and we assessed impact/effort in the previous step, we asked folks to move the candidate post its to the new 3x2 matrix of the 6SI model. We did this to make sure we had ideas on at least 4 of the 6 quadrants. The end result is a 3x2 matrix of 6SI with at least four of the quadrants filled with initiatives, picked from lowest effort, highest value onwards. We tried not to have too many activities on the same 6SI quadrant, as influence comes from ideas in all six.
4. Mapped to a calendar, and assigned owners. At this point, all that’s left is to pin those initiatives to a calendar, and assign owners, which we did.

You can find our list of ideas here (coming soon). Great artists steal. We’re delighted to serve.

Final thoughts

We’ve described the entire process here with you, not because we’re experts at product vision statements, but because this whole thing for us is an incredible, inspiring experiment. In fact, we’re still executing our “Make it Stick” stage (which never end).

The good news is, when you now ask anyone at Flyt what we do, you start to get similar answers. People use the terms of our product vision in conversation. They talk about how something is part of the “The Hub”, and how some design “is about The Marketplace”. It comes up in meetings. It inspires our customers to talk. It has helped frame scope discussions. It has helped make decisions. It helps us to say no.

Our only claim here is that something IS working. If you put a reporter in front of anyone at Flyt, you can trust they can explain what we do and how we’re going to win. And that’s more than what we can say for many of the boringly long product vision statements we found around the internet while researching.

So we hope it helps you. Definitely 🐥 tweet at us if it does. Or reach out via e-mail with any questions. Or better yet - with your own experience with casting or following someone else’s product vision.

We’d love to hear more about that.