A culture around “vision”

In 2021, just between Mercadona Online’s slack public channels and all the private ones I took part in, the concept of “vision” was mentioned 151 times in total by more than 20 different people. Including members of every guild — Product but also Engineering, Design, or Operations- of our cross-functional teams, aka “Verticals.” That is… more than once every three days throughout the year!

The first results are shown for the search of “vision” in 2021 on our Slack company account

About the image above:

• Fer Diaz is our CTO, and he was giving some feedback on the Last Mile team’s quarterly goals, reinforcing the message to focus on the vision and the strategy to get there.
• Mario is the super manager of our data team. He was sharing a weekly report that tracks data usage and cost incurred around our Big Query data warehouse (yes, we love to track almost everything!). And he also mentioned the Data Engineering team’s vision.
• Estela is one of our Product Designers, and at that time, she was involved in our Capacity team. She shared some mockups that included longer-term flows based on their specific product vision in her message.

Unfortunately, I don’t have data of any similar team to compare with, and probably the fact that we have embraced the concept so much in our day-to-day work mechanisms makes me take it for granted. But putting it into perspective, I really believe that this is indeed the result of gradually building a work culture over the years that has constantly pushed us to define, update and continuously pursue a product, solution, or an operational vision…or even a peaceful life in Middle Earth.

Slide taken from an internal Product team workshop of Mercadona Online

I come today to talk specifically about this, and I will split up the content into two separate posts:

1. In the present one, I will tell you in some more detail about our own culture of product vision: how we’ve been able to build it and why it is a crucial tool for us.
2. In the second one, I will share what, for me, is one of the most significant success stories of this way of working:

a) Envision an operational “architectural” change in our Colmenas — bee-friendly fulfillment centers of Mercadona Online

b) Define a cross-team execution strategy that could be providing value to the business on our way

c) And finally see ourselves testing the first implementation of this vision one night of February in Valencia.

Come with me on this journey if you feel interested!

Start with a strong company vision

Since the project’s launch more than six years ago, we have conceived and transformed Mercadona Online into a strongly product-oriented organization. Its “products” and “solutions” should always be at the disposal of business goals and our ambition as a company.

For those of you who still don’t know the project and avoiding falling into the details that can be found in other blog posts or even some podcast talks, we were invited to. It would be extremely difficult to just have one product vision in Mercadona Online without resulting in simple generalizations or addressing the how rather than the what.

Under the same umbrella, two very different worlds in terms of product nature coexist the online store and the logistics process. And even within them, sometimes very particular problems are solved: domain, the context of usage, target users, technological solutions that can be applied, etc.

However, as faithful followers of the entire Marty Cagan’s product legacy, we believe that every product organization must have a unique reason for being, which must be unique and shared by all its members. This should be its Mission. And simultaneously, in what we understand to be even more fundamental, an approach to the future that, as a team, we aspire to build and achieve altogether, which constitutes its Vision.

I’ve said before that this story is about vision, so I’ll stick to this essential work culture lever.

Marty himself talks about it in one of his valuable posts:

An inspiring and compelling product vision serves so many critical purposes that it is hard to think of a more important or higher-leverage product artifact.

In our case, Mercadona Online has a clear vision, one that is born directly from the business and which sizes the magnitude of what we ambition to reach:

Make 5% of Mercadona’s total sales, meeting the satisfaction of our 5 components: “Jefe” (the customer), Employee, Supplier, Society, and Capital.

Anyone who does a quick search on Mercadona’s latest annual sales will notice that we are talking about a turnover considerably above one billion euro. An operating model that, in line with our business model cornerstone, can guarantee: a service of maximum quality for our customers, a decent job for our workers, and a profitable business. It is not saying little.

Let the vision permeates

Under this global target future paradigm, our vertical teams have complete autonomy to work on their specific vision, which should now be closer to a more proper product vision given the limited and narrowed-down domain they attend. This one must always be aligned with the global one and should help us achieve it.

And moving deeper into the next level of work structure and dynamics throughout this culture of product vision, we also encourage the teams during the definition of their quarterly goals to formalize a specific vision attached to them. In some cases, it can be shared with other teams’ goal vision; in others, it can directly point to the team’s global vision, and in some others, it can be defined explicitly for the goal in particular.

An example of real quarterly goals with attached visions defined by our In-Colmena and Last Mile teams

What is really valuable in this way of working, beyond how or at what level this vision is defined in each case, in the exercise of the team, or even cross-teams, brainstorming at the beginning of a given work cycle — a new team, a new quarter, a specific project…or even a sprint — on how we envision the final state of what we are addressing to contribute to the achievement of the last joint vision.

The normalization of this exercise as a standard and shared team ritual is fundamental and incredibly helpful in our work context, especially in the field of the teams that look after the logistics process — the majority! — where:

• There are often strong interdependencies between teams when we face problems and try to develop solutions. In our operational facilities, either a Colmena or a store, up to 4 different teams work in continuous processes and flows that have several touchpoints and interrelations.
• Our teams are multidisciplinary and cover technology — what we might typically understand as “product” — and the physical operations as a whole. For us, envisioning the global picture of the operation, including processes and technological solutions, is essential. However, sometimes we need to manage opposing positions from the perspective of each discipline involved. In fact, I personally often like to say that we really work on “operational solutions” that we make available to end-users. We jointly and collaboratively address complete “operational solutions”! It is not a product — ”technology” — alone, and it is not just a process, but the binomial of both things that must always go hand in hand.
• The problems we manage have a powerful physical dimension, which often brings about some important constraints. Some decisions have implications on equipment, facilities, and people that sometimes are not that easy to reverse or change. On the other hand, the business as usual operations live together with the need for continuous improvement of our “solutions,” This, of course, also has its consequences in the development cycles, tests, and operational launches or roll-outs.

And then, the “catchphrase” comes up

Taking inspiration from the company-level vision allows us to define further a team’s vision or even a shared cross-team vision. This provides us with some key elements that enable us to move forward with more certainty in a shared direction:

• build altogether long-term goals that can generate motivation, drive, and commitment based on their future impact.
• alignment between teams in decisions and paths with mutual relevant implications.
• more certainty for the engineering teams about where we want to go so that the actions we take now will never hinder and ideally even facilitate future implementations.
• unlock the definition of operational and/or product strategies that help us take “smart” steps while adding value to the business on our way to the final vision.
• have a target scenario to share with the others — other teams, other company areas, the end-users themselves, etc. It can provide some light on our work out there, get different stakeholders onboard to the plan, or simply ensure the integration of external visions that could fine-tune or help improve it.

In Mercadona Online, same as in Mercadona, we strongly believe in the power of an organisational culture, which allows us to understand each other, develop solid work relationships and eventually work similarly and in the same direction.

Like any other value or principle that aspires to become an internal “cultural” practice that ends up permeating throughout an organisation, some determination and insistence are required in the message from the company’s management and board members. Our CPO, Javier Querol, plays a key role in that context within the Product team!

Its integration into day-to-day dynamics and frameworks is also essential — team onboarding, quarterly goals, all-hands presentations, product initiation or requirement documents, etc. And experiencing its potential contribution in the first person or the problems that might arise when we move away from this approach will make of course the final push.

Finally, I can then promise that after some time, patience and perseverance, those “sweet” moments will begin to happen naturally and frequently, whether on Slack or face-to-face, in which any member of the team will begin the sentence with that beautiful catch phrase of: “The vision is….” And it’s really cool. Indeed!