Vision: The Root of the Radical Product Framework
Early in founding my startup, I learned an important lesson that has stayed with me. I was fundraising and every investor I had spoken with that week had a different idea on why the problem we were solving was the wrong one and what problem we should be solving instead. At the end of the week, I met with my advisor — I was processing all the contradictory feedback from the week and needed a sounding board.
After listening to me for a while he responded, “Fundraising is not about convincing the skeptics, but rather finding the true believers. But before you can find your true believers, you have to have your conviction first. What’s your conviction? Where’s your North Star?”
Whether you’re leading a company or a product team, every successful team is driven by a common vision, a conviction. Without that, your team is like a boat in the middle of passing currents — unless you’re guided by a North Star, you soon begin to drift.
While you can iterate on the methods to achieve your purpose, no amount of iteration can ever help you find that purpose for your company or product. That has to be your vision, based on your deep understanding of what’s needed for the market (or for the world).
How do you know if you have a clear vision?
Here are a few simple questions you can ask to evaluate if you have a clear vision:
- Is it a purpose that drives you, or are you describing a tool? Something bordering on an existential question is a more apt vision. In speaking with a founder recently, he initially described his purpose more like a tool: “Building a platform to do…” After some probing, and once he showed me an artist’s rendering of the world he was trying to get us to, his purpose became clear to me. We reframed his vision, which really started with: “To change how we interact with the world so that…”
- Are your business and product decisions true to that vision? Does the team struggle to prioritize among hundreds of features and ideas in the backlog? It’s important that your vision is not just a few words on slides but rather that it guides every decision at the company. When your team has an actionable vision, instead of seeing 500 features to prioritize among, they see interim steps that are derivatives of that purpose. This approach offers immense clarity on what’s important and how you prioritize features to achieve these interim milestones.
- Is there a shared understanding of the vision across your team? Ask people on your team, “What do you believe our vision is?” Are you hearing an articulate vision? If you’re not, or you’re not hearing back what you expected, it calls for some introspection — you may need to define a more articulate vision, or you may need to communicate it more clearly (and more often) to your team. A very important side effect of everyone internalizing this purpose is that you’ll unlock immense cohesion in your team — without this, it’s very hard to get through the start-up Tough of Sorrow.
While my examples of vision statements in this post were lofty, yours doesn’t have to be. But it must drive you. For example, at my startup Likelii, we were galvanized by the idea of creating a simplified and fun path to learn about and enjoy wine for every consumer who wanted it. Each of us on the team loved wine and felt this pain point. Your vision doesn’t have to change the world, but it should energize you and make you and your team feel like you are adding to the world.
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Product is a way of thinking. Radical Product is a movement of leaders creating vision-driven change — you can download the free Radical Product Toolkit, a step-by-step guide that makes it easy and practical to apply product thinking.
