Product Management Guide: How to develop a Product Vision? ✨

Have you ever felt like your main purpose as a Product Owner/ Product Manager is to produce more features? Do you recognize that stakeholders are just pushing for their own priorities and work to be done? Have you ever felt lost in the woods with all these different stakeholders pushing and pulling you around? If so, well, you are not alone! Unfortunately, many Product Owners and Product Managers are forced to act like Story Writers, Backlog Secretaries, and Project Managers. But no more! It’s time to move the profession of Product Management forward, and one critical step in this journey is to start envisioning the future, and to up our story telling skills.

In this article, I want to offer you a 5 step guide so that you can improve your visioning and story telling skills. I’ll run you through a series of visioning & story telling workshops that I do with Product Owners and Product Managers, to help them create an inspiring vision and to communicate about it through story telling. Enjoy the journey!

🧭 Introduction to Product Vision

A product vision describes the ultimate purpose of a product. It paints a beautiful picture of the future to come. It describes “why” a product exists. It communicates what positive change the product will provide. You can think of it as a North Star, a guide along the product journey towards success. A product vision helps to inspire the people developing, marketing, selling, and supporting the product, and is essentially used to inspire and inform all the relevant stakeholders. If done well, a clear product vision is also used to inspire customers and users. To put it like leadership expert Simon Sinek, in his book Start with Why:

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you it. That’s quite interesting. I personally experience this statement by Simon Sinek to be true. When I talk to prospect customers about our Professional Product Managment learning journeys, I always talk about our Vision first. I talk to them about our why, and why they should care. In most of the conversations I had with these prospect customers, they are already on board with the product (they are ready to get started), before we have talked about its features, benefits, and costs. Starting with your vision is simply super powerful!

Without a clear vision, many product teams and their stakeholders have trouble seeing the bigger picture. They change course frequently and they often disagree on what to do next. The Product Owners/Managers in such teams often feel like the Story Writers, Backlog Secretaries, and Project Managers mentioned before. It feels demotivating when people can’t tie their work to the value the product provides. It is a bad situation for your product and customers too, because you will often not be able to deliver the experience that customers want, if you are not clear on why you are providing it. Vision brings the future into everyday work. It helps the entire organization understand the larger purpose of the product. When done right, it inspires and motivates everyone to do their very best work.

A Product Vision or the Product Vision Statement is a description of the essence of your product: what are the problems it is solving, for whom, and why now is the right time to build it. A Product vision gives your team a bigger picture of what they are working on and why.

🔥 A big or a small product vision?

When people think about (product) vision, they think about “putting a man on the moon” kind of stuff. However, a product vision doesn’t always have to be THAT BIG… The following video by Kevin Dame, Head of Product Visioning at YouTube, explains this idea very well. Kevin Dame essentially explains how visioning can happen on three different levels, or that there are three different types of visioning. These three types are: Versioning, Visioning, and Venturing.

An example of Versioning to me is the Tesla Model 3. Tesla had already developed and launched the Model S and model X, before launching the Model 3. Although the target audience and price range for the Model 3 is different, it is basically a different version of the car, but with a lot of similarities.

An example of Visioning to me is the Tesla Cybertruck. This is quite a different type of car, with different features and benefits. It serves a different kind of purpose and focuses on a very different target audience.

An example of Venturing is SpaceX’s reusable, two-stage, returning to earth launch rocket. A similar example is Tesla’s Autonomous Driving vision, which wasn’t (and still is) not that common in the car industry.

Venturing ideas are the giant moonshot visions that most people think about when they talk about the topic “vision.” However, most companies spend their time on Versioning instead. Most companies are making small improvements to their existing portfolio of products and services. Venturing on the other hand, is not what most people do. The odds are that you as a Product Owner/Manager are also spending most of your time on Versioning. Perhaps you are working on a whole new product, for a new target audience or market, but it is likely that you are doing Visioning at best (not Venturing).

For all three of these types of innovation, product vision is useful. It’s useful to let small improvements to existing products and services be guided by a clear product vision. It’s evenly valuable to let a product vision guide larger innovations (Visioning) and huge new adventures (Venturing).

🔩 Elements of a great Product Vision

An inspiring vision statement should inform a clear direction and priorities for the organization, while challenging all the team members to grow together. A vision needs to be something that people can ‘see’ in a way that makes them want to move towards it. Below you will find various characteristics of powerful visions:

It’s Compelling and Ambitious. Powerful visions must draw people, attract them, make them want to take action and overcome obstacles to achieve it. It must feel worth achieving, worth putting real effort into getting there. It evokes emotion.

It’s Challenging yet Achievable. There must be a balance between having visions that are seen to be achievable, and that also challenge and stretch people. Too far either way and they lose power. However the right balance can inspire people beyond what they think of as their limits. A vision will only inspire action if people feel it is realistic and can be achieved, rather than simply a nice but impossible dream. It describes an outcome, the best outcome we can achieve. It does not confuse vision with the business goal and objectives for a particular period of time. A vision statement, therefore, does not provide numeric measures of success.

It’s Aligned and Inclusive. The vision must fit with the organization and its people, culture, and history. This requires an insider’s understanding of what will makes sense and work within the context, while possible stretching a little beyond. Too many visions focus on the interests of a limited group, such as one department or a single organization. Visions need to include the interests of the broadest possible community, well beyond the organization, in a way that everyone can see their value and can support them.

It’s Distinctive. Every organization is unique, and it is almost impossible to take another’s vision and expect it to be powerful. There is great power in a vision that is clearly distinctively relevant to the organization and people involved.

It’s Clear and Visual. A vision must be readily communicated and understood by a broad range of people. This doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to be simple, but the essence must be able to be captured and conveyed to achieve a common understanding. A great vision also helps to build a picture, the same picture, in people’s minds. It’s clarity allows people to actually see it in front of them, as if it’s already there, up for the taking.

It’s Short and Relatable. The best visions are generally short and powerful. The powerful phrase is repeated in whatever communication mediums you have to trigger memory of the longer statement. It is not a brand strap-line. The vision should also be relatable to people, especially to people’s everyday activities, jobs, and behaviors.

Five Big 🚶🏽‍♀️Steps Towards A Product Vision ✨

Alright, enough said about product vision. Hopefully you are convinced by now that having a clear and compelling (product) vision is valuable. So, let’s dive into the process of creating a product vision. The process and five big steps I use to create a compelling product vision are inspired by Kelsey Shanahan’s Product Vision Sprint concept. The five steps are:

1. Explore the Now ⏰
2. Imagine the Future 🚀
3. Craft the Story 🏰
4. Test with Stakeholders 📢
5. Polish & Share ✈️

Let’s dive into each step in more details below.

Our Getting to a Product Vision Process

Preparations 🔬

As mentioned earlier, a great product vision is Aligned and Inclusive. It must fit within the organization and its people, culture, and history. It should be aligned with the company vision, and company strategy, it should have a clear problem to be solved, and be focused on a clear target audience/market.

Before you start working on your product vision, make sure to collect some useful input in the organization. What I found to be useful input to have available before working on the product vision is:

1. The Company (or Tribe, Area, Cluster, Domain) Vision;
2. The Company (or Tribe, Area, Cluster, Domain) Strategy (the strategic goals and objectives to be achieved);
3. The main customer, user, or market problem(s) to be solved;
4. The main customer/ user target audience(s) to be served.

Gathering such inputs into one place is often very helpful. This might be something like a wiki page or Sharepoint location, but I personally prefer to add this information to a Miro/Mural board, because it is easy to share, easy to navigate, and easy to get a good overview of all the available materials and inputs.

Step 1: Explore the Now ⏰

Using the inputs and information from your preparations, you can move forward to step 1: Explore the Now. In this step, your main focus is to identify the current situation in the marketplace. You will identify the current product, market and company context. This step helps everyone (Product Owner/Manager, Product Team, Product Developers, Stakeholders, and Customers or Users) to get on the same page about where we are today.

It is recommended to Explore the Now in a workshop-setting. This workshop usually takes around 3-4 hours to complete. So, invite your product team, relevant stakeholders, (potential) customers or users, and perhaps fellow Product Owners/Managers. The exact attendees depends on your context of course, but you’ll figure that out for sure. Usually, there is some finetuning work to be done after the workshop, but that is not always required to be done with the entire group.

Step 1: Exploring the Now

During this workshop, you will collaborate with your attendees, and together you will explore:

• Context Map — A snapshot of the current environment, helping each other to understand the environmental factors, trends and forces impacting the product (area). Current industry and market conditions, incl. external factors, such as political, economic, and technological trends.
• Job Map Canvas — A clarification of the customer problems to be solved, by creating a Job Map Canvas. This canvas helps you to identify and solve the right jobs to be done by your customers.
• SWOT Analysis Canvas — Presenting the case for change. We survey the product’s strengths and problems in relation to the major opportunities and threats it faces. The strenghts, weaknesses, opportunities and threads for your product.

Step 2: Imagine the Future 🚀

Now that you have created more clarity about the current situation, you can move forward to Step 2: Imagine the Future. In this session you will be identifying what product qualities, feelings, and experiences your customers/user desire from the product. Understanding well what kind of value your product needs to offer your customers, will greatly help to shape a clear and compelling vision. You will also work on identifying what your product does, how it is better than others, and why people should care about it. The why, how, and what form a strong foundation for a compelling vision statement. Finally, you will bundle the artifacts you have created in a simple one-pager, like a vision statement, or a product vision canvas.

Like with the first step, it is highly recommended to develop the product vision in a collaborative effort. So, invite some peer Product Owners/ Managers, invite your product team(s), and invite some stakeholders to craft the product vision together. During this workshop, you will collaborate with your attendees, and together you will explore:

• Product Experience Canvas — It’s time to get the ideas flowing. Using a simple technique, you will imagine being a user of the product/service, listing the qualities that matter most and the feelings associated with these qualities.
• Golden Circle Canvas — Coming up with a vision statement and ‘rallying cry’ is often the hardest part of defining your vision. To do it, start with the following exercise, using the Golden Circle Canvas based on Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle.
• Product Vision Canvas — The Product Vision Canvas helps summarize your product vision and core product aspects in one overview. Even without the final vision, the contents of this template are valuable. It’s worth experimenting with the elements you put in this template.

Step 3: Craft the Story 🏰

Storytelling is ingrained in our DNA. Ever since we started hunting mammoths, living in caves, and avoiding sabre tooth tigers, we’ve been communicating through stories and visuals. Stories have the ability to change the way people think and feel — which can be very powerful. Storytelling is becoming more and more popular, and is becoming a common way for (product) leaders to communicate their vision and ideas. A great benefit of storytelling is that you can talk about your product (with customers for example) without making it sound like a sales pitch. The message you want to communicate will very likely resonate and stick more with your audience. Storytelling is a powerful tool to align people, and bring them together around a vision, and an experience. Stories allow you to inform, persuade, and inspire people.

The activity of creating stories to communicate your product vision is an effort that can again be completed in a workshop setting. You can create various stories through collaboration with other people. It is very interesting to hear what stories other people can share about the future of your product, and the experiences (stories) they had. Alternatively, you can design some stories on your own if you want. In order to develop your vision story, there are a couple of activities to be done:

Image: Story Design and Story Telling in Five Simple Steps

1. Select the type of story — First you need to identify the type of story you want to tell. Is the story intended to inform people? Is it to inspire people? Or is it to persuade people? The type of story to tell influences the stories’ design and how to communicate it.
2. Perform an audience analysis — Next, you need to perform an audience analysis. The intended target audience to whom to tell the story, has a big impact on the stories’ design. So, who are you creating this story for? What is the skill and knowledge level of your audience? What are they looking for?
3. Create a story design — The step that follows is to design your story. It’s best to first highlight the important aspects of your story. You don’t need a complete beginning to end story right away.
4. Write the story — Now that you have a Story Design, it’s time to turn that into an appealing story that will move your stakeholders. In this step you’ll explore the art of storytelling in practice.
5. Communicate the story — Finally, it’s time to share, to inspire, and move your audience. Practice your stories, and share them often.

Example Miro Canvas to Support Activity 2: Performing an Audience Analysis

Step 4: Test with Stakeholders 📢

Congratulations, most of the hard and time consuming work is over! Oh wait, maybe it isn’t… You have done a ton of work though by now, and most of the actual “work” is now over. However, it is now time to start testing your vision and stories with other people. Here are a couple of questions that we found very helpful in this fourth step of testing with stakeholders:

• Does it help you identify priorities for the product?
• Does it help you understand how your activities add value?
• Does it create a clear picture of what you intend to accomplish?
• Is it clear how you can make a contribution?

To put it simply, consider that this fourth step is like going to an optician or optometrist. We want to test if people can see what we see. We want to test if our vision is “visible” enough. But also, if they find it inspiring and helpful, and if it offers direction and guidance.

Image: Testing if people can see the Vision (image by aao.org)

Step 5: Polish and Share ✈️

In this fifth step, you will work on communicating your vision with your team(s), peers, and stakeholders, in order to test it, obtain feedback, and then to further polish your vision and stories. Always keep refining and communicating your vision and stories with the people around you. Communicating vision never stops!

We recommend testing and validating the vision and stories in a small setting first. So, find a peer Product Owner/Manager that you trust and feel comfortable with, then pitch your vision. Ask them how it makes them feel, what it makes them think, and if they have any feedback for improvement. Then move on to an important stakeholder. Someone you want to get on board with your vision. Someone who matters in the future of this product. Pitch your vision/story again, and get feedback. Move on to someone outside your company, a customer perhaps…

Another very helpful tool is to record yourself. It may feel a bit awkward at first, but record yourself while pitching your vision/story. Then watch the recording and see how you are presenting. How does this pitch make you feel? What do you feel you that can improve about your pitch? Also consider your non-verbal communication, it’s not just about what you say, but also how you say it. Essentially, keep testing and learning. Remember, don’t limit yourself to pitching to people you know well. Friends and family will always tell you how amazing it is, so use other people for feedback! People you don’t know very well perhaps, or that you don’t work with very closely…

Another useful activity in this fifth step, is to collaborate with people who can help you to visualise the vision. For example by creating story boards, one-pagers, illustrations, or other visuals. There is quite nothing like “visualising vision”. Remember, how a vision is a pretty picture of the future? Well, how about actually painting that picture?

Image: Visualise Your Vision (image by ImageThink.net)

Evangelise 🗣️

Whoohoo! All set and done! The product vision is done. The stories were designed and tested. You are all set for success. And you have only just got started. The real work actually starts now. Being an inspiring and visionary product leader is not about telling your vision just once. In fact, it is a massive pitfall that many (product) leaders step into; just sharing the vision once, and assuming that everybody now knows about it! Too bad. It doesn’t work that way. It’s a continuous activity of passionately telling, selling, and promoting your vision to the people around you. The continuous process of evangelising for your product vision has now begun.

🏁 Wrap-up

Hopefully, this article offers you some inspiration for developing your product vision, and for communicating that vision through stories. Of course, there is not one perfect approach towards developing a product vision. There are many tools, techniques, processes, and frameworks that can be used. This article illustrated an approach that we have often used with our clients at Xebia Academy.

The contents from this article are covered into much more detail in our Professional Product Management Training Module: Envisioning & Storytelling. So, if you want to collaborate, get trained, facilitated or if you want some help getting your product vision and stories in place, please reach out! We are happy to help.

🎓 Excited to move your Product Management skills forward?

Becoming an expert in a field takes more than a single course. Consider it to be a journey, requiring knowledge gathering and experience in practice. That is why we have developed Product Management Learning Journeys for Product Owners, Product Managers, and Product Leaders.

We have found that people often want a structured approach to boost just those skills that they need to improve in a specific section. In order to enable that, we have set up various Professional Product Management Training Modules. Modules like Value Maximization, Envisioning & Storytelling, Strategy & Roadmapping, or Stakeholder Engagement & Politics provide you with 8+ week learning and development tracks, allowing you to really improve a specific area of competence, instead of going through a very generic course that covers all kinds of different topics on a high-abstraction level.

A typical Professional Product Management upskilling track at Xebia Academy

Our learning journeys are designed to find the perfect balance between the theory from university with the intensity of a bootcamp. These ingredients are blended into a training format that fits anyone’s preferred style of learning. We teach you enough theory to know when you’re playing with fire, but we focus on applicability for the job to be done.

The journeys offer a personalized approach for professionals to grow their capabilities and to advance their careers. The blended learning journeys around product management consist of (competency) assessments, trainings, workshops, exercises, on-demand content, personal reflection, coaching, and consultancy.

The foundation of the product management journey is formed by the PPM framework. It’s connected to your product career framework and is implemented throughout the whole learning journey.

Want to get started? Take a moment to explore our website, learn more about our approach to Product Management, or schedule a chat about how we can help you, your team, or company to move forward.

Overview of all Competency Areas and Professional Product Management Training Modules