Creating a product vision requires solving a paradox — for a vision to be compelling it must be single-minded and sharp, if the edges are rubbed off it becomes uninspiring and doesn’t create evangelical zeal. But, at the same time, in most teams and companies it needs to be co-created. PM’s and PO’s, developers, designers, UX people, the list goes on.
For these people to buy-in to your vision, they need to feel involved, but when it comes to product vision creation, too many cooks does indeed spoil the broth.
So what to do? How can you work together to create something singular?
The answer is to deconstruct the components of a great vision, create a process to work together as a team on each component, and then empower one person (or a small team — 2/3 people max) to synthesise the output into a singular statement.
This delivers the best of both worlds — an already involved team that can apply their cognitive diversity to the challenge of vision creation, with the single-minded focus on the final outcome that’s essential to an inspiring product vision (that creates missionaries not mercenaries).
So what are the principles of a great product vision? For this we turned to Marty Cagan, author of “Inspired” basically the Bible for any good product manager or owner, go buy this book if you don’t own it. According to Marty there are 10 principles of a great product vision:
- Start with why.
- Fall in love with the problem, not the solution.
- Don’t be afraid to think big with vision.
- Don’t be afraid to disrupt yourselves because if you don’t, someone else will.
- The product vision needs to inspire (you can make any vision meaningful if you focus on how you genuinely help your users and customers).
- Determine and embrace relevant and meaningful trends.
- Skate to where the puck is heading, not to where it was.
- Be stubborn on vision but flexible on the details.
- Realise that any product vision is a leap of faith.
- Evangelise continuously and relentlessly.
After some noodling around (some of these are executional follow ups and behaviours rather than foundational components), we ended up with a final list of key components for a product vision, against which we wrote setup questions (provocations) for the team in the room to work with:
1.Fall in love with the problem.
Provocations: What is the most exciting problem we could solve? What problem scares us? What problem can we not immediately see solutions to? It’s not a problem that just looks complicated or hard work, it’s a problem that, if solved, would be transformational for our users.
2. Disrupt ourselves before someone else does.
Provocations: If startups came into our space and started working with no legacy systems and no process and no hierarchy, what would they do differently?
3. Embrace relevant and meaningful trends.
Provocations: What are they key trends in technology, in customer and user expectations, in the systems we are surrounded by and connected with, that will rapidly change over the next 5 years? What technology are we not currently thinking about that we should be thinking about?
4. Realise any vision is a leap of faith.
Provocations: What will we choose to believe that we cannot prove in the pursuit of transformational change? What will we say is our leap of faith that we are being brave enough to make?
5. How do we inspire and help our users.
Provocations: What would make a 10x change to the way in which we help our users? What would be the opposite of an incremental improvement? How do we create new value for users rather than cement what we have? Be bold.
6. How will we be missionaries not mercenaries.
Provocations: What would make you a missionary for the work you are doing? What could we be doing that makes you evangelical about spreading the word of what you’re working on? What would you want to go and recruit people to?
We then took the Lightning Decision Jam methodology designed by AJ and Smart and applied it to every step. Here’s how it works:
- Facilitator introduces the topic and gives the team the setup/provocation behind it to make sure we’re all thinking in the right mindset and about the right problem.
- Team are given 3 minutes of silent alone working to note ideas against the topic.
- Each team member then sticks up their post-its with an absolute maximum of 30 seconds explanation. Descriptions on post-its must be legible and self-explanatory.
- With all the post-its up on the topic of the canvas everyone is then given 3 dot stickers and two minutes to place their dot stickers on the post-its that they think contain the most important ideas.
- Facilitator does a quick prioritisation of the post-its based on number of dot-stickers (heat-map technique).
- Facilitator guides a short discussion asking people who put stickers on one of the prioritised ideas why they did so. (5 minutes)
- Team moves to the next component of the canvas and repeats the exercise until all topics are complete.
With that exercise complete you’re now in a great position to hand off a completed vision canvas to the one or two people that were made responsible for crafting the final vision statement.
The cool thing about this approach is that it gives you a step-by-step recipe for creating a great product vision, and enables you to fold a broad team into the process, whilst avoiding the bluntness of group-think and the danger of ending up with something that everyone could agree with but no-one is excited by.
Just running a group through this exercise can create an energised, ambitious feeling in your team, perfect if people are stuck or blocked or the energy on a project has started to drain.
What do you think? Feel free to use and share this canvas and approach — let us know how it goes if you do!
Download your copy here
And if you need help with the final synthesis, or just setting up and moderating the session, just hit us up.
