The product vision definition guide

Welcome everyone to the Product Bakery. I'm Alex and I'm sitting here again with my dear friend and co-host Christian. Good afternoon Alex. Christian, when we started this podcast a couple of weeks ago, we were talking about applying product principles, processes and methodologies to our own podcast and look at it the way you would look like at a product and the way we would look at like developing a product in terms of like also the way we would constantly try and iterate on the format and try to make it fit like also our users or listeners needs. I think part of this is obviously like also having a product vision in place and I know that you already wrote a lot about product vision on your personal blog so I think it's definitely a topic that is very important to you and where you also bring a lot of experience. I thought it would be great to discuss this in separate episodes or just between the two of us. Thinking of product vision, what are the things that our listeners need to know? The very first thing the audience need to know is that you and I right now are working on a product vision for our podcast which is always a kind of challenging topic. This is nothing you're gonna do in a one-day workshop or in a couple of hours but what do need people to know about a product vision? I see there are two parts we should look at. The first is the kind of theoretical background behind a product vision, what it is and what it isn't and on the other hand how you can define as a product manager, founder, team, any kind of person in the company a nice product vision. If we start with the background around a product vision it's important to understand what a product vision is. A product vision describes a bold future state of a product or service that you believe in and that you want to achieve. So we're not talking about something that can be developed in a year. For example let's say you are WhatsApp. Back then when I just got started with pure chat functionality the product vision of WhatsApp wouldn't be saying hey we want to enable sending photos. So we're really talking about being the most used chatting app in 21st history or something like this which is super bold but also they are getting there or they have already hit that goal and they are already working on an enhanced vision which also identicates that a product vision is a living thing. It's not something that you define once and it stays like it is. The product vision describes a future state that you want to achieve and it gives you a good understanding of what you want to do in the future or what you want to have or what you want to provide to your customers. What it isn't is a detailed plan or a detailed description of how you get there. For this you have rather something that is tightly connected to the product vision which is a product strategy and out of the product strategy you can derive a product roadmap and out of the product roadmap you derive the little pieces into the backlog and then lastly you have the delivery. But in this episode I would really like to focus on the product vision. It's this one overarching theme that you use for everything along the way. Exactly and I can tell you when I had this I think it was one and a half years ago this big challenge of really defining a product vision I was just sitting down and the first thing I did obviously I was opening Google and was checking okay product vision and then I realized by all the search results that I found there were a lot of company visions. There were guides, examples, blog articles, even books about it but I realized all this kind of stuff is more focused on company visions and not a product vision. First of all we should understand what is the difference between those kind of things. A company vision can be equal to a product vision when you are a single product company. Let's imagine we are GoPro and we're only selling one camera and we have the kind of product vision that this would be the most enjoyable camera that sport people can use in their sport activities. That never breaks. That never breaks exactly. Not perfectly phrased but I think you know where you're going at. So considering this it would be absolutely fine to say the product vision equals the company vision or vice versa. These days we see more and more companies transitioning into multi-product companies or multi-service companies and the moment you become a multi-service company it's not that easy anymore to find an overarching product vision because you have many products. The best example is Google. Their product vision is I think to provide back then I think like a couple of years ago the product vision was to provide search information by one click or something like this but now there are so many Google products like the Google Calendar, like Google Drive, like autonomous Google cars etc and the product managers are sitting down at Google and defining clear product visions for each of those products. So that means a product vision is dedicated to a product and in multi-product companies there is a difference between a company vision and a product vision and therefore the creation process is also completely different. And in today's episode I would like to talk about the phase of creating a product vision to really focus on your product that you are as product manager, product designer etc working at on a day-to-day business and I want to help people finding the right vision by not telling them what the vision is but by giving them the right tools to get there. From that I also understand that if the company vision is like more the larger level like really a high level where the company wants to go the product vision is something that is really on a specific product level. It's not even a thing that's entirely defined by let's say the CPO in an organization but it can be something that every product manager on its own has to define. Exactly. Part of the product vision is the kind of company vision. So you have this overarching company vision and your product vision should fit into the company vision. Something that I also don't want to exclude or that I think is very important to mention is that a product vision statement is ideally one nice catchy phrase. So you have a very nice sentence that needs to summarize everything that gives people a clear direction. So it sounds very tough so having this one perfect sentence where everyone says yes that's exactly what we need this is the way to go. And obviously you need this on a company level which is already quite a challenge. Nevertheless the exercise for product people is to sit down and do the same for your particular product. Maybe on this one here I definitely spent quite some time in sessions defining company visions or product visions or brand visions attributes and so on. It's like this this classic workshops where exactly you try and come up with this one sentence and I think at least what I've been faced with also a couple of times is like people challenging do you really need to spend that amount of time to work on that specific sentence? Is it not that we already know where we're going to? Especially smaller companies I think it's yeah we're anywhere like five people we should all be on the same page. Where is the value in coming up with this one sentence or spending so much time on it? The sentence we are five people and we should all know what the direction is includes the word should. And yes it is true that in smaller teams it's way more clear what you're doing and why you're doing things. Nevertheless my counter question would be then what speaks against phrasing this in a sentence you all agree on? Especially when you want to grow and to scale. Because as a founder team or as like the kind of core team of a company it will be always clear for you in which kind of direction you want to go. But new people who just recently joined they might not have the same amount of information that you have. Yeah but I think it lays exactly there where also the problem might be. Which is the founders are probably the one challenging it because they have their vision they know where we're going to and from a very pragmatic standpoint they see it as the start of thing of we write some values and principles and visions on the wall. How would you deal with this kind of attitude? Generally I'm not the evangelist who says you need to have a product vision. This is at the end of the day in everyone's responsibility especially on sea level to define whether you want to have it or not. What I can tell you is that definitely with growth there are a lot of positive aspects coming around it. Just bear in mind you are a development squad or you are attending a town hall with a couple of hundred people. How nice is it if you have this one clear stated sentence on a company level that tells you in which direction you want to go. I remember at SumUp for example we had this company vision of we believe in a world where small businesses can successful doing what they love. Every employee out of this almost 2,000 people knew this sentence and clearly had a direction they want to go. And every Friday in our all hands we were repeating the sentence and kicked off the town hall by asking people hey why we're here and boom people were shouting out the sentence. So the benefit of having a product vision as well as a company vision obviously helps your team and your squad to focus and have a clear direction you go. Just imagine your product vision is that you want to provide the most relevant information on one click for people to make the right dress code decision related to a weather app. Just imagine you come up with a feature or you stumbled upon some nice product ideas that people want to build which is for example pulling data from upcoming sunstorms that could potentially change the weather. All those things are nice but the question is does this really tie to what we're doing right now? And it helps people also doing backlog groupings doing roadmap discussions to really challenge what is right now on the plate and making sure that we focus on what our vision is. So you're saying it's also important to use this then to validate your day-to-day actions because I think when I'm referring to this nice phrases on the wall I have definitely also seen that they were developed to be there on the wall but nobody really uses them under day-to-day action and then I can totally understand that's maybe a little bit like of a overkill but if you use it in your daily operations it makes a lot of sense. Exactly and we need to keep in mind having a product vision defined is one point. The other point is to make use of it especially as a product manager or product owner who interacts with stakeholders or especially with your development team on daily or weekly basis in backlog roomings, print plannings. It's so important to constantly bring up the phrase and to constantly remind people of what the product vision is. Just imagine that you are a developer and you just fixed an important incident on production and then you're jumping into your next meeting. Do you have all the priorities in your mind right now in the kind of mode where you fully focus on the product vision etc. So you have so many other things in your mind and here comes the product person in place who advocates and constantly repeats the reason why we're here. Now the question is how do we get there and what are good product vision examples. We just touched the point of having a very nice sentence which I'm a big fan of but this is not necessarily a must-have. First of all we should have a clear understanding and goal of the future state of the product. I like the example of Google Calendar. Google Calendar back then had a very nice four-point vision. They said our future product must be fast, visually appearing, and joyous to use. The second point was drop that simple to get information into the calendar. The third point was more than boxes on the screen which I really like and the last point was easy to share so you can see the whole life in one place. If we look now how Google Calendar looks and how nice it is designed and how many people are using it I would say they definitely made very good progress into that direction. Just imagine in every kind of backlog grooming they had over the last couple of years it was constantly repeated and everyone in the team knew what the goal is and this helped them right now looking at the product to build exactly what was written down there back then. Now the question is I'm a product manager, I'm a CEO or founder how can I define a product vision? And before we started the podcast you also asked me who is the one who is going to drive that and who is the one who defines a product vision. That's not that easy to answer. I'm a big fan of extreme ownership so someone needs to take it and do it. I believe that when you are at the stage of a company where you have product people it's great for them to pick that up which doesn't mean that anyone else could potentially do this. In early stages for sure the founders acting more as product people and could potentially cover this. On the other hand once you're growing it can be also an engineering manager, tech lead, etc. But as a product person I believe that a product manager should drive that. Which doesn't mean that you are the one who's sitting in a room and just defining it by yourself. That brings us actually to how you can define a product vision. I also googled a little bit around and there are templates and there are some suggestions. Roman Pischler has a nice sentences where you can fill out the gaps to define what your product vision is. And I believe that's very good to get clarity and also make sure that you cover different parts like what is the market, who is the persona, etc. etc. I'm a big fan of collaboration in that sense. That means bringing people in one room and sitting down and doing it in a workshop style. In order to define a product vision you need to have information. We touched up on the topic of research a little bit in our episodes and we will even more in the future. It doesn't make sense to define a product vision if you don't have enough data. You need to have a basic understanding of the market, of your audience, of your target group and also you need to have this forward thinking of what your product should be. Looking at the Google four-point vision they had clear requirements we can almost say on that it has to be easy. It has to be more than just boxes and it needs to be easy to share, to have all information on one glance. How do you get there? The first thing you need to do is you need to have the basic understanding. You need to have market data, you need to have maybe even usage data if you are applying this build, measure, learn style by building prototypes and collecting data. If you are a product team now or a product manager, let's say you're a product manager who wants to pick up the definition of a product vision, what's the best way to define it? I'm not sure if there is the perfect way to do it but what I would like to share are a couple of ways how you can get there. I would like to look at two different methodologies or styles that you can approach. The first one is let's say you have data. Scheduling a two-hour workshop for example with related people which can be your squad, which can be stakeholders, which can be even the founders. It's important to come into one room and I would recommend of not being more than eight people because studies have shown... Pizza, it's the American pizza for the team or how's that rule? Yeah there's the two pizza rule you should be able to feed. Which doesn't work in Italy where one pizza is definitely for one person specifically. Yeah so let's focus on the number eight here. So having a small group of people coming together is the first step and then someone needs to kick it off by presenting the data around the persona, the market cap, the current usage, the potential features you want to build or the direction you want to go to. And once you have clarity I think it's a great way to kick off the session once you have presented with everyone saying hey every one of you takes now a couple of sticky notes. We're not discussing anything. You write down your thoughts that you have. What could be an inspiring sentence? And before people start writing down a sentence I would even split it up by saying okay think about four things while you thinking about what needs to be part of the product vision. Write down what is the target group. Write down what are the needs. Write down what will be the USP and what kind of business goals do you have. So there are four things you need to think of and that you write down on at least four sticky notes. And then I like it a lot when everyone goes to the white board or if you do it remotely in Miro for example. Everyone presents to the group what he or she has written down without any kind of discussion. And once everyone has presented you start a grouping phase. That means you're gonna group the most favorized topics into one and you try to define a headline. Let's say we want to build WhatsApp. WhatsApp is not existing or just exists as a kind of prototype. We say okay the average persona is the Italian Alex Tapunt. Yeah so we focus on which would imply Italy. Then two other people would say hey we want to build WhatsApp for everyone on the planet. You would identify favorites here and you can have a better discussion, a better foundation for discussion to really try to nail it down in a way that everyone agrees on. And you do this for every part that I mentioned. You also think about what is the target group. You think about what is the USP. You try to imply also business goals. So speaking about the different parts what needs to be in there like you're saying the persona or at least like kind of the target audience. What else is part of the user of the product vision? Business goals and the USP. Once you have this kind of things identified so for example one says the USP of WhatsApp it's fast. The next one says it's easy to use. The next one says super nice design. You can categorize them and vote. You need to make a decision and you should bear in mind that the product vision is something that is not final. It's something you iterate on. I don't want to use the buzzword agile being agile here but you know what I mean. And once you have this kind of things identified and it will take time. It's nothing you're gonna do within a couple of minutes. It takes hours and maybe even days. But once you have that you will first of all have clarity on where you want to go. And you will maybe have different kind of options which is also fine. Maybe you have two favorites or three favorites. It's absolutely fine. Then we come to the kind of part where we need to phrase this into a very nice sentence. I'm having also on my blog three type of different templates. You can say we believe in and then you can say we believe in the world, in the status or in the time or etc. Where the related persona can do XYZ. Or you could say to empower the average Italian person who doesn't want to do his taxes or her taxes. You can phrase your vision like that. Alternatively you can go very simple and say our vision is to design, provide, build the future state in order to make lives easier for the persona. I also recommend to not try to focus too much on writing one sentence or trying to use one favorite you have agreed on play around and create multiple ones and go through it and through it a couple of times. Also don't be shy or don't hesitate to invite people and ask them for feedback. It's an iterative approach. That was the part when you have already information in place. There is another one that I also like because in the real world you don't always have the perfect research product and sometimes as crazy as it sounds it is a kind of not gambling but it relies also on gut feeling. Back then when Steve Jobs invented the iPhone there was no okay we need to talk to one million customers until we know people want an iPhone. And I think Henry thought it the same. He didn't talk to people and ask do you want a car? And they answered no we want to have faster horses. So the other option that I like is doing it again in a kind of workshop style. Asking people simply the same question again. What do you think is the target group? What are the customer needs? What is the USP of our future product? And what are the business goals that we should aim for as a company? And let people prepare it upfront. Let's say you're now a group of six people. What you're going to do is you kick off the session with a 10 minute time box and bring two people together. Let's say you are six and you have three groups of two people and let them decide on two key points that they have defined before. And once this is clear you do another breakout session for 20 minutes where you mingle again with two groups of three people and then you bring all people together for another half an hour or an hour and try to merge the idea to maybe even one or two. I think that's a very cool workshop style where you don't have maybe too many data but still good ideas that then will be interactively developed during the one-to-one and group conversations. And at the same time, I feel if already we say product vision, it should be something visionary, right? It's something in the future where we also don't have all the answers. So I really like also the approach of you maybe don't have everything like perfectly answered at the beginning. And as long as you commit or agree that it's an iterative process, it should be visionary, right? Yeah, and this is exactly the point where the process unfortunately stops many times. The product vision is once defined and then no one wants to hear anymore, hey, we need to spend time on refining it or challenging it and rethinking our definition based on data. What I recommend here is to once a quarter or at least once every six months to sit down in a group and to rediscuss it. There's no problem to set up an event that is recurring every three months, one hour product vision challenging, product vision challenge session that people sit down together, especially on a leadership level to rethink, hey, are we on track? Or what do we need to do as a leadership team to make sure that we're going into the right direction? Do we need to involve more people into this process? Do we need to get feedback from the engineers? Do we need to get feedback from the marketing team? And where are we right now? Is this still too far away or did we make very good steps into the direction and need to maybe adjust and make the goal even bolder and bigger? Has the market changed, especially now due to the current health crisis? For many people and for many companies, product visions might have changed. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I can totally see some companies moving from completely physical interactions to the digital ones, or even thinking of a company like Airbnb, who also extremely changed their way of approaching the product and offering experiences in the digital space, which was something I'm pretty sure wasn't really on their roadmap initially. Airbnb is a company that completely needs to reinvent itself right now. And these kinds of sessions can be very helpful to come up with maybe even better ideas or ideas and future state of their product and service that matches the current needs. Wrapping it up, I would say, first of all, it's important to understand that the product vision is super important to give people guidance. I want to emphasize again on the importance of having one clear direction for people. I believe it bounds also teams a lot. It helps on the team bounding aspect. It helps a lot on the direction. It helps a lot to focus. And understanding that the product vision is not a detailed plan. It's really a direction. That's the first thing. And the second thing is, if you believe that you are the person who should drive it, don't hesitate, collect the data you have and set up a workshop and bring people together, no matter if remote or in person, to really brainstorm what the perfect product vision is. And instead of starting an open discussion, which takes hour and very likely is not that most productive, invite the people to write down their thoughts, let them present and then groom and vote on what you have written down instead of just having CEO speaking all the time or like a hippo, high paid person's opinion, having like only one person who is dictating the direction and not involving the rest of the team. Which I think is generally a good approach that can be applied to all sorts of workshops and discussions to have it a little bit more also facilitated and get everyone's opinion. The workshop approaches that I've shared, they are applicable for almost every type of workshop. I'm a big fan of it in my role as a product coach. Nevertheless, I agree, it is good to have structure in your facilitation style. And yeah, again, going back to the question, who should do it? My tip here is really just take ownership and do it. All right. Christian, thanks a lot for sharing all these insights. I'm sure we will hear more about product vision also moving forward. Enjoy the rest of the day. Thanks, Alex.