Team Vision and Strategy with Klarna
Clear and aligned Vision and Strategy are the keys to successful and autonomous teams. Rushil Dave, Product Lead at Klarna, shared his insights on documenting Vision and Strategy and keeping it up-to-date at our recent Product People community event.
Why Should You Care about Vision and Strategy as a Product Manager?
Every Product Manager should motivate and inspire the team and align its work with the vision of the company, that is why having a clear vision and strategy is always important.
At Klarna, each team is very autonomous, which means each team lead needs to act as a CEO of a small startup. Coming from this experience, Rushil shared these important reasons for having a clear and well-documented vision and strategy:
- Motivate and inspire the team
- Align teams and stakeholders on problem space(s)
- Guide the team with fundamentals and vision
- Stay focused on customers need and prevent distractions by new ideas
- Enable the team to achieve the goals and measure them with KPIs
- Keep up with the discussions on conflicting priorities
Without vision and strategy, it’s easy to jump from an idea or opportunity directly into solution mode without seeing the bigger picture and then end up in scattered attempts to build products without clear path and benefits.
How to Build a Good Vision and Strategy Document?
Rushil shared this possible structure of the document that comprises the vision and strategy of the company/team based on the best practices:
It is important to involve the whole team into setting up this document — here is some advice to guide you:
- Set long-term vision — have a description of what your product will be in the future. It will help your team to remember why you are doing something.
- Involve the team — the vision should be the constant value that the team believes in.
- Spend time with your customers — to understand who they are, what they value, and how you can help them.
- The vision and strategy is not a static document — it is a living document and needs to be kept alive.
Make sure to motivate and engage your team by providing clear reasoning for this activity and explaining how it will help in their day-to-day work. It might be very helpful to organize an offsite for the team to work on vision and strategy document together without the usual distractions of the office (check this HBR article for tips and tricks of a virtual offsite — for fully remote teams or in the situations of restricted travel).
You probably will need to work on this document in several steps, regularly aligning with the team and stakeholders and creating feedback loops:
Let’s go through the structure and peculiarities of different parts of the vision and strategy document one by one.
Team Vision and Strategy Document
Imaginary Press Release
An imaginary press release should be able to give your team and the audience an extreme clarity on:
- what you are doing
- why you are doing it and
- how that will help your customers. And why it will help them.
Start with a rough press release, at first just noting down different points, then work on vision and strategy and then work on the press release closely, making sure it reflects the problems to be solved and their impact on the customer.
The structure for the imaginary press release:
- Heading and summary
- Company and team introduction
- Problem(s) to solve
- Solution(s) to those problem(s)
- Quote from someone (your company spokesperson and hypothetical celebrity happy customer)
- How to get started with your product
- Customer impact
- Closing and call for action
Keep your imaginary press release simple and short, just 3–4 sentences for most paragraphs. Don’t use technical terms and jargon, which are difficult to understand.
Further reading: Amazon Press Release by Andrea Marchiotto.
Vision and Mission
The vision statement should be:
- a long-term objective
- representing the team’s core essence
- purposeful and impactful
- customer-centric
The mission statement should be:
- explaining your approach to achieving the vision
- clear, concise, and continuous
- collective (referring to “we”) and action-driven
Sometimes it’s okay to combine vision and mission statements together if t makes more sense in your case.
Also, be prepared that, vision and mission statements can be difficult to formulate for the teams with complex problem space and it might take you more time in such cases.
Background and Purpose
Documented background and purpose help to set the tone for the team’s problem space and strategy:
- explain the reasoning behind the team’s existence and the impact it has on the company's vision and strategy
- make the audience understand the history and “where are we coming from” part
- help the audience understand what challenges the team is facing and why
Documented background and purpose will also be a great help for the onboarding of new team members.
This section should answer the following questions:
- Why does your team exist? Why was it established in the first place?
- How does the team create impact and fit into the organization?
- What would happen if the team didn’t exist?
- What have you tried until now? What were successes and failures?
- Any legacy problems or systems your team inherited?
Problem Spaces and Scope
This is one of the most important sections of the team strategy document which should clearly state what consumer problems your team is or will be solving and how. It is so important because:
- it provides a clear focus and way forward in the difficult situations with conflicting priorities and concepts: there are always more problems than your team can solve, it’s crucial to prioritize
- it prevents overlaps with other teams and their problem spaces: it often happens that teams have very similar scopes and it is important to know how they are different
- it helps to identify the challenges to overcome to deliver the team’s vision and strategy
Structure the problem space and spice section by providing a general overview and then describing in more detail different problem spaces.
Overview
- What your team does on a higher level
- What customer and business problems it solves
Problem Space #1
- Introduction and definition
- What exact problems will be solved within this space
- Solution-specific points but only on a high level
- What is in the scope here? What is out of the scope here?
Problem Space #2
— its own description —
Problem Space #X…
Guiding Principles
They are your team’s Core Values, that help guide the team in conflicting situations and difficult discussions. They also help the team to align on the team’s strategy going forward with other teams who might be working very closely with your problem space.
Make sure to explain these principles well with reasoning and any side effects or implications.
Goals and KPIs
KPIs are the reflection of mid-term goals tied to the solution space of your team. Make sure to build SMART KPIs with explanation, definition, and target:
Specific
Measurable
Actionable
Relevant
Time-framed
It is important that you also pick the right measure and collect quality data to track your KPIs correctly. Create dashboard(s) to visualize changes and progress.
Roadmaps
A roadmap should reflect time-bound short- and mid-term milestones on the path towards your goals and the vision. Create the roadmap specific for 1–2 coming months but flexible for the time afterward to be able to adapt promptly in the rapidly changing and unpredictable situations.
Some tips: Kanban-style roadmaps are very helpful for pipeline-based projects. Use MoSCoW method when you need to prioritize and build roadmaps for time-boxed projects.
Closing remarks
Don’t forget that your team’s vision and strategy document should be alive and evolving together with the team and its problem space as well as changes in the company vision or objectives. This means you need to revise it regularly, at least every 6–9 months or earlier if big changes are happening.
If you are starting a new team or your team switches to a new problem space, you will most probably need to revise vision and strategy more often, every 3–4 months, until you can formulate a vision and strategy that will serve you longer.
For the product-focused teams, you can also use a similar approach to describe product vision and strategy.
Additional reading:
- Product Vision, Strategy, Roadmap by Jens-Fabian Goetzmann
- 18 Core Company Values That Will Shape Your Culture & Inspire Your Employees by Caroline Forsey, HubSpot
- re:Work Guide: Set and communicate a team vision by Google
- re:Work Guide: Set goals with OKRs by Google
- How to Develop and Use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) by Erica Olsen, OnStrategy
Watch the full version of Rushil’s talk and check the slides for more insights and tips.
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