Start with a Mobile Vision
Vision is a loaded word that has earned an eye-roll response for many of us who have been handed “visions” that are as vague as they are unrealistic and unachievable. So, I approach this entreaty to show the value of a good vision with more than a healthy measure of skepticism.
A great product vision strikes the perfect balance between aspirational and achievable. The common metaphor applied when people talk about strategy and vision is a north star. While great for general navigational purposes and for identifying the big dipper, I would aim for something closer to the horizon, something that your team can understand and be inspired by but is also easy to break down into actionable work that can be measured.
The product vision for your mobile app shouldn’t be a 30-slide Powerpoint or even a one-pager document. The beauty of a great vision is that it can be communicated in a well-crafted statement that is easily understood by all. Here are the key ingredients:
- What is your product?
- Who is it made for?
- Why will they love it?
- Why is it better than any other alternative?
That’s it. Let’s look at an example.
The Procrasdonation app is for people who feel guilt and anxiety about failing to prioritize and complete important goals. The app allows them to assign a dollar amount to a goal along with a deadline and when they fail to meet the deadline, that amount is automatically donated to a charity of their choosing. Unlike other methods for tracking goals like to-do lists, Procrasdonation combines a tangible penalty and reward mechanic that users will love because it motivates them to better themselves but improves the lives of others even when they fail.
This vision statement distills the essence of the product and its value to users with unambiguous language. This app (if it existed) is likely a lot more complex than what is described here, but these three sentences tell the complete story. There’s the protagonist, their conflict, the proposed solution, and the dénouement. If your vision statement runs longer than three sentences, you are probably too far in the weeds.
Let’s look at a less effective example of a product vision.
Procrasdonation is an app that helps people achieve their goals while also giving back to the community. The app will transform the way people think about and prioritize their goals because it introduces a whole new way of thinking about them.
This version attempts to do some of the work of a good vision statement but fails to tell the complete story because it doesn’t explain the core function of the app and how it specifically addresses a user’s problem in a way that is different than any other alternative. Simply stating that something will be loved by people is not an effective story. Showing how and why it will be loved is the key ingredient for a good story and by extension a good vision statement.
What does a great product vision do for your mobile app strategy?
Most importantly, it puts your users and their needs at the center of the story and keeps them there as a constant reminder. Marketing may want to shove a lot of extra content into the app that gets in the way of users completing their primary goal. Finance may push you to take a higher percentage as a “service fee” which you know will undermine trust with your users. Your product vision is the contract you have to ward off these requests and protect what is the heartbeat of any successful mobile app: happy users.
The process of collaboratively crafting the vision statement for your mobile app forces your leadership team to agree on exactly what matters most and how to communicate that in a way that every person in your organization can understand and rally behind. Given the complexity of conceiving, designing, developing, releasing, and marketing a mobile app, it is easy for an organization to miss the forest for the trees.
Your engineers could have a strong opinion that Procrasdonation users should be able to create sub-tasks beneath their goals and only be penalized a percentage when they fail to meet the deadline. Designers may insist that the app provides no onboarding experience because they think their UX design is intuitive enough. Your product manager may be trying to force you to create an MVP that is so spare it doesn’t demonstrate enough value for new users to care. Problems can compound quickly in a product team as different disciplines bring their points of view to bear, and you may find yourself with a mobile app that is so far from what it was intended to be.
What a strong vision provides is a way to filter out anything that does not directly drive towards achieving that vision. In any of the scenarios mentioned above, any team member can bring out the vision statement and ask the simple questions:
- “how does _______ help us accomplish this vision?”
- “how could _______ put the vision for our app at risk?”
The answer to these questions will still be a debate, maybe even a lengthy one, but at least you have some solid boundaries to help focus the discussion. If everyone understands the atomic core of your product, they will be less inclined to contribute ideas that muddle that value.
How do you create a vision?
Like most meaningful initiatives we tackle with work, crafting a vision for your mobile app should incorporate a diverse team from different disciplines who all care very much about the thing you are making. In most cases a product vision can be accomplished in a two to three-hour workshop provided you have invited the right people and those people are prepped with the following:
- The goal of the workshop
- The ingredients of a product vision
- Examples of great vision statements
- Understanding your users’ needs
- Understanding your app’s core value proposition
At Rightpoint, we facilitate these workshops in nearly every engagement, regardless of whether it’s a brand-new mobile app or a redesign of one that’s existed for years because it is the single best way to get a team to come together and reach a consensus on where we will focus all our energy in the coming months. While it’s ideal to conduct these in person around a whiteboard with stickies, we’ve had great success using remote collaboration tools like Miro. Whoever facilitates the workshop should keep a few important principles in mind:
- Encourage writing thoughts down as opposed to shouting them out when you’re in the generative/ideation stage. This levels the playing field so that the senior-most or most extroverted individuals don’t dominate.
- Listen for opposing points of view and explore them fully. This should be a safe place for anyone to challenge assumptions about the purpose of your app. The best visions are chiseled with nuance that comes from healthy debates.
- Delegate someone to be the scribe. Good writing is not done by a committee so elect a strong writer within your group to write and iterate on the actual vision statement throughout the discussion.
- Get 100% buy-in before everyone leaves the workshop. Silence is not agreement. If someone is not vocally onboard with the vision encourage them to speak up. Silent consent can quickly turn into destabilizing descent in the future.
Finally, while your mobile app’s vision is important it’s not immutable and etched in stone. Over time, you can and should revisit the vision. With any luck, your product will grow and become too big for a single vision statement to cover everything it can do for your users. When this happens, you might find it useful to craft separate visions for different feature areas.
Want help with your mobile app? The Rightpoint Digital Product team would love to learn more about the challenges your facing. Please reach out so we can set up a chat.
