How to make a product vision that sets a direction for the team

Thus, it is essential to have a crisp product vision, when you work as a Product Manager, Product Owner, manager for a development team, or a manager for several
teams. You must be able to set direction.

Without direction, it is like driving full throttle without knowing where you’re going. But how do you start, and what is the difference between the product vision and the product strategy? That’s what I am going to outline here.

Product vision and product strategy – what the heck is the difference?
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To put it briefly, the product vision is the ‘destination’ for your journey, while the product strategy is the ‘road’ to the destination. If we, for a moment, imagine that you
are going on a trip, your destination might be Malaga, while the road to Malaga might be driving to the airport, flying from Kastrup Airport to Hamburg, and then on to Malaga.

The road to Malaga, and the ‘journey’ in itself – that is, the strategy – includes choices, choosing to disregard some things, and preferences for how to get there. You might want to drive the whole way?

You might have a very old car that will most likely not survive the long trip? All of these are strategic considerations regarding reaching the destination(the product vision).

The strategy contains an overview of partial elements and the chronological order, but also preferences such as product principles that can be a way of expressing preference for how you handle various dilemmas.

What do you do, for instance, if you cannot accommodate two different types of customers at the same time, and instead prioritize something that accommodates one of them over the other that might even influence the experience the other customer segment in consequence?

It can be quite a dilemma, and to be able to make choices in these situations, you can write down product principles or experience principles to be able to handle and ‘guide’ these situations.

As an example, eBay works with a product principle that buyers on the platform should be accommodated over the sellers – if you are in that dilemma, that is, because at the end of the day, it is the buyers’ success, that turns into success for the sellers who use the platform.

The product vision is therefore rarely found without the corresponding product strategy, because without an execution the destination will merely be an illusion. Therefore, you need a plan, and that is by and large the product strategy, and it is also the strategy that outlines your choices and trade-offs on the way to the vision.

You may need to disappoint some stakeholders, when you down-prioritize something, to be able to build something else. The strategy, therefore, is essential to create alignment about how we reach our goal.

Well, where are we going?

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Onwards to the PRODUCT VISION itself. The product vision paints a picture of your destination. But where is that?

To paint the picture, there are a couple of elements that you, advantageously, should orient yourself towards – and that you probably already have a good insight into. I usually say that the product vision is built up around two elements:
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• Why we have to do something? (context)
• What do we have to accomplish? (and for whom)
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Additionally, there is the ‘third element’: Communication. How do you create – with the two abovementioned points in mind – a narrative, that create followership?
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What is the story, and how is it told? Because, no matter how many strategic analyses and considerations you carry out, the most important purpose of the product vision is to be able to create followship, and create alignment in the team, between teams and with stakeholders.

To be able to do this, you need to be a crisp communicator. We will look more into this in the third point of the following section. But to be able to convey your message strongly, and have a strong, credible story, there are a couple of elements that you need to have completely under control, and that will help you to communicate credibly.

1: Context – ‘skate to where the puck is going to be’

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The first element that you must look into, is the entire context of why you have to make a change and/or position the product differently for the future. That is, what is even the motivation for doing anything at all?

What opportunities, or what ‘pressure points’ motivate you to do something, change your direction, make a new product/service, or change up the existing offering. Typically, the product vision is driven, or motivated, by one or several of the following factors:

• New technological opportunities
• Changes in user behavior or altered expectations from the consumer
• Changes in the market, and/or the competition
• Changes in legislation
• Internal conditions in the company
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Typically, these elements are connected, so that for instance, legislation entails a change in the competitive situation with new players entering the market, new players with smart technologies setting new standards for the consumer expectations etc. You can call it a kind of ‘nexus of forces’, that is, a kind of self-amplifying effect between the various factors.

Let me get specific with a couple of examples

Here you can see a couple of examples of changes in context and motivation to ‘move’ and offer new services:
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Energy supply: the end users have had electricity meters installed, that automatically register consumption (A: new technological opportunity). This gives the opportunity to supply real time data to the consumers, so that they can monitor their consumption more closely and avoid surprises in their energy consumption. The consumer will most likely perceive this as an improved service, and thereby a better product.

Traditional banking for private customers: The market for investment is lucrative (at least until recently). The market has yielded nice profits, and deposits are subject to negative interest rates that must be paid (C: A change in the market), so customers wish to have less money in ‘cash’ on their accounts. So, more and more customers are incentivized to invest in the financial market via stocks and funds (B: Changes in user behavior). At the same time, new market entrants like SaxoBank and Nordnet have entered the scene with more simple solutions for investing (A: New technological possibilities, as well as C: New competitive situation).

In other words, it’s all about, strategically and with vision, finding out where you want to take your product, in order to stay relevant, generate value and retain your position in the market, as well as predict where the market is going, and how you want to position yourself in it. As Steve Jobs so cleverly quoted Wayne Gretzky on Apple’s ability to constantly create innovative products: “I skate to where the puck is going to be”.

This was the hockey-legend Gretzky’s explanation for how he was so successful in the sport. He skated to where the puck was going to be.

So simple :)

2: What do we have to do, for whom?

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So, based on opportunities or pressures (or both), what is it we want to create and accomplish? Here, it is crucial to be specific on, what we want to do for whom? Who is the customer, and what do we want to give them?

Maybe it is something new, maybe it is just an addition to an existing product. Maybe the customer is a paying end user. Maybe the customer is ‘internal’ to the company – perhaps a coworker, whose tasks will be easier to do, so that they will save time. No matter, it is central, that we can say with certainty: WHAT WE WANT TO CREATE FOR WHOM.

From the earlier examples, we can continue and come up with examples for what we want to do for whom:

Energy supply: (Because of all the things we listed previously) We want to create an online overview of a household’s energy consumption, so that our private customers can monitor their consumption on a weekly basis and avoid any unpleasant surprises.

The traditional bank: (Because of all the things we listed previously) We have to offer more nice, simple investment solutions for the mass market of private customers, so that we don’t lose our market share to the ‘new’ competitors.

3: Communication – how do we tell people what we want to accomplish?
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And how do we communicate simply and efficiently, so that people around us can understand where we are going and act on that. Regarding the communication itself your choice of ‘artefact’ is completely open.

You have already produced the story, if you have followed along on points 1 and 2, because then you can tell; why you have to do something, from the considerations on context and also tell; what you have to do and for whom.

So far, so good.

You can use different narrative forms like situation, complication, resolution, or fairy-tale composition like hero’s journey etc. It is important to rehearse the story, and the elements must be founded in logical conclusions, so that you can tell the story easily – also when you only have a few minutes and have to make it in the format of an elevator pitch.

This can help you communicate. Finally, there is a number of artefacts, that can help you communicate.

Those could be:

• Vision/Mission statement
• Whitepaper/presentation
• Storyboard
• Customer journey
• Vision video (future scenario – future use case)
• Press release from the future

If you, for instance, are to create a simple onboarding process, it can be easily expressed with a form of vision statement: “We want to create the onboarding process, that is so simple, that the customer doesn’t even notice it”.

At the same time, an onboarding process can be pretty complex, so if, for instance, there are many conditions involved in the process, it can be a storyboard or a customer journey, which is the best at visualizing what you actually want to create for the customer.

I hope that this article has given you some small insight into how you wish to handle your product vision, and what it can consist of. It does not have to be super complicated to make a product vision.

In fact, the most difficult part is often to communicate it as simply as possible, so don’t forget to put in some effort there. It is exactly the ability to create a following, that makes all the difference.

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