FUNDAMENTALS OF PRODUCT LEADERSHIP: BUILDING THE VISION
A product leader’s guide: product vision and principles that empower teams
Product leaders are responsible for their product vision and principles and every strong product vision will encompass seven core elements to succeed:
1. Brings customer centricity
2. Creates alignment
3. Sets scope of work
4. Leverages megatrends
5. Enables persuasion
6. Empowers teams
7. Drives team topology
Ownership
The head of product is responsible for delivering the product vision and strategy. To act on this:
- The head of product will need to collaborate with the head of design and engineering/technology to understand the desired UX, enabling technologies, and the need of the business
- The vision will need to be shared and communicated with the CEO and/or respective GM so that they find a sense of ownership of the product as they will be selling it to internal and external stakeholders
The purpose of a product vision
An organization’s mission statement summarizes the purpose of that business and why it exists, however, it does not outline how a business unit or product team will deliver on that mission. That’s where the product vision comes into the picture and a compelling, inspiring, and empowering one aims to address several important purposes:
- Brings customer centricity: to keep the product team(s) focused on the customer problems and needs
- Creates alignment: by building consensus across various members and teams as a North Star and a platform for common understanding, and creates a clear long-term vision of what is to come so that the technology team can build the architecture for it
- Sets scope: provides meaningful work, by moving away from output-delivery-based teams to outcome-focused ones and inspires teams out of their comfort zones to create amazing products and solutions
- Leverages megatrends: by riding with macro trends of possibilities across the industry (supply side), customers (demand side), and technology landscape (enablers) to create value
- Enables persuasion: by acting as a powerful persuasion tool for recruiting talent and evangelizing the product
- Empowers teams: by coming along with a set of complementary product principles and ethical codes of conduct as guidelines to make decisions with
- Drives team topology: by defining team structure and resource allocation
1. Brings customer centricity
While acknowledging that every company has its objectives with the end goal of maximizing revenues and/or minimizing costs that trickle down into the objectives of every other team including the product teams, however, we need to build products that solve actual customer problems.
Therefore, the product vision must tell its story from the users’/customers’ perspective, demonstrating how their lives will improve in a meaningful way. Usually, when building a product vision that aims to solve meaningful degrees of customer problems, we need to look for a 3–7 year vision, depending on the complexity of the problem, and this requires a visiontype, a conceptual high-fidelity user prototype that demonstrates the end state of what the vision will be.
With a strong product vision in place, it’s the product team that needs to figure out its strategy and years of continuous discovery and delivery to deliver on its promise.
2. Creates alignment
Similar to the guiding role of the North Star, the product vision needs to deliver a common sense of purpose and destination to all of the product teams. As the number of product teams and members grows, this is alignment become more crucial as teams can get caught up in their respective problems and lose sight of the overarching organizational goal. In other words, the product vision serves as the knot that brings all the teams together.
For large product teams, the product vision needs to answer two big-picture questions for its members:
- What is the end game state?
- How does my work contribute to the end game?
Product architecture
The technology/engineering team needs the product vision to ensure their architectural decisions serve the needs of the future-to-be. This does not mean that they will build the future infrastructure and architecture in one go, but they have the end goal in mind and can plan and allocate resources. A clear product vision also helps the technology team plan for its technical debt resolutions.
3. Sets scope of work
A product vision needs to move away from fixating on feature-focused roadmaps and toward describing a compelling and meaningful end state in the future that the various teams will be trying to build. The product vision can’t describe how the teams will get there, as that will be up to the teams’ strategies and discovery efforts.
The product vision timeframe is generally 3–10 years depending on the industry’s lifecycle and the complexity of the problem you are solving for.
4. Leverages megatrends
There are always emerging technological and social trends, with some being short-term hypes and others real and longer termed. Successful product visions understand and leverage one or more major trends to build their end states to help deliver substantially innovative solutions.
Most meaningful and long-lasting trends will take 5–10 years till full adoption and value creation, and that’s why it makes sense to have the product vision outward looking into the same timeframe. Furthermore, it makes sense to revise the product vision every 3–5 depending on the speed with which the industry trends change.
5. Persuasion
A product vision that is compelling, inspiring, and persuading is a gift and a positive reinforcing loop that will keep on giving
Validating the vision
Every product vision and promise needs to be validated with demand with the assumption that if the product were available today, would people use it, why, and in what ways?
However, it needs to be noted that because the end solution is not yet available, the end state will need to be continuously tested and discovered in the years to come so that a sticky solution is found.
Communicating through a visiontype
A product vision’s main objective is to inspire stakeholders. To achieve this, PowerPoint presentations will rarely work and the minimum requirement will be a high-fidelity vistiontype along with a scripted video. The difference between a visiontype and a prototype is that the former aims to describe the world once the vision has become a reality in the next 3–10 years (longer term) while the latter describes what will be built in the coming weeks (shorter term).
The visiontype needs to describe how different types of users/customers will use and experience the product while using visual and audio effects to maximize the emotional impact. The visiontype’s focus will need to be layered to describe the storyline from the users’/customers’ point of view at all times.
Recruiting tool
Strong talent desire to work on aspirational and meaningful projects that are larger than themselves. They are missionaries and not mercenaries and rather than working for compensation or amenities, they care about customers and their problems and how their efforts can help them.
Therefore, for product leaders, a compelling and persuasive product vision will serve as a low-cost but crucial recruiting tool.
Evangelizing asset
Product leaders and teams need a variety of stakeholders including executives, investors, sales and marketing teams, customer service, etc. to understand the future they are creating as their collaboration will help bring their solutions to life and reach their full potential.
Product evangelism is a never-ending job and messages will need to be repeated over and over again. A strong product vision will be the guiding North Star that will make this continuous effort less of a pain.
6. Empowers with principles and ethical codes
Product principles are the product team’s values and beliefs that complement the product vision by stating intentions and guidelines when making product decisions at scale. This helps empower product teams by giving them the context required to make decisions autonomously and be held accountable for them.
Product principles are generally there to help teams make the right call when making trade-offs. For example, a principle in the case of building financial services products can be that no matter what the situation, security priorities will trump all development efforts even if it comes at a growth loss. Another example would be when a product is harmful to teenagers and therefore will need to build friction into the onboarding and registration process which will hurt growth.
7. Drives and shapes team topology
Next to read: The 5 principles of successful product strategy for product leaders
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