I'm not here to preach another way to build your Team Mission and Product vision but to remind you that they are foundational for your team and product.
One of my favorite things to do on the job and, at times, for other teams is to facilitate workshops and discussions. Two of my favorite workshops are Team Mission and Product Vision.
You know those times when you get your team and key stakeholders in a (virtual) room and think about what problem you are solving and the future of the product? I love it, and it's an excellent opportunity for me to assess the engagement of engineers.
It's also a chance to lay out a strong foundation to guide you when making prioritization decisions, empowering the team, and engaging well with the leadership team.
These two are powerful tools and the backbone of your product decision stack.
Yet, I have observed PMs downplaying this often or working on Product Vision without engaging the team.
My intention here is not to criticise how Product Managers approach this but to give some basic guidelines on why these are important, how to write them, and how to use them.
Mission
A Team Mission should be intentional about who you are as a team, what you want to achieve with your product, and what problem you are solving for the world.
Some good examples of missions are: "make the world more open and connected," "organise the world's information," and "we are in the business to save our home planet." Notice there are no mentions of the product or product capabilities(!)
These also help in the conversations with stakeholders and other teams and help you prioritise better.
I usually always run this workshop first for two reasons:
It's the foundation of my product stack.
It helps me run the Product Vision conversation better and run it around what will happen when we would have achieved our mission?
Visualised here:
To give a concrete example, a Team Mission for a Platform team could be:
As an Engineering Enablement team, we want to enable a seamless Developer Experience by building a high-performance, secure, scalable infrastructure and tools.
And a MIRO template that I have used to run this:
Tips on running the workshop:
Encourage the team to engage
Set a clear timer for each section (for example, 10min each)
Create small clusters in each section with different themes
Collaborate on writing it with the team
…and most importantly, have some fun too!
Vision
Probably my favorite quote around Product Vision comes unsurprisingly from Marty Cagan in INSPIRED:
" When done well, the product vision is one of our most effective recruiting tools and motivates people to come to work every day. Strong technology people are drawn to an inspiring vision - they want to work on something meaningful."
While that may sound too aspirational, that piece has always guided my career choices and how I worked on building products.
As Product Managers, crafting a Vision is one of our core jobs. The Vision will help improve our product, set it apart from the competition, and, most importantly, align it with the company's Vision and Objectives.
Some key steps to help us when crafting a vision are:
Understand Your Market: this involves both market research and analysing your competition.
Know Your Unique Value Proposition: this sets you apart from your competition.
Define Your Users: who they are, how they behave (yes, behavioral science plays a big part in this), their pain points, what delights them, etc.
Be Clear and Intentional about the problem you are solving: if we don't truly understand the problem and the context in which the user is having the problem, then our Vision will reflect that.
Some lessons I learned throughout the way when working on your Product Vision. A Vision is usually:
aspirational but not very aspirational
user-centric
vague but not too vague
long term, 3+ years for software products, even longer for hardware products
communicate it widely, and while, yes, get some feedback, make sure you don't turn it into a feedback committee
revisit every year, depending on your context
always have it written in all your docs, slides, and whatever comms pieces you use. Over-communicate.
I highly recommend these three artifacts:
This piece from Reforge: 3 Key Parts Of An Effective Product Vision — Reforge
This
Podcast:
And some simple templates to write it:
Our product will achieve […]
In the future, we will […]
Our capabilities will offer […]
As a concrete example, here is a possible Product Vision for a Platform Team:
"In the future, our product will offer full reliability and scalability, empowering Engineers to simply and autonomously build, run and deploy software."
Finally, there are cases when Mission and Vision are interchangeable. Rather than getting stuck into the theory and frameworks, you should ensure that at least one statement guides you towards building a product that is usable and solves and actual problem. Whether that's the Mission or the Vision.
And always collaborate with your team on this (including designers, researchers, and key stakeholders).
See you next Friday!