Laying the Groundwork for Vision and Strategy Workshops through Discovery & Analysis

INTRODUCTION

As a leader and/or a product manager, one of your most critical responsibilities is to lead your team in creating a clear vision, setting strategic goals, and developing outcome-based roadmaps. However, before you dive into these essential tasks, comprehensive discovery and analysis are paramount. This preparation ensures that your team has a solid foundation to build upon, maximizing the chances of creating an impactful and achievable vision. In this blog, we'll explore how to conduct this discovery and analysis, where to source relevant information, and how to facilitate an effective workshop with your team.

UNDERSTANDING THE CURRENT STATE

Before you can plan for the future, you need a clear understanding of the present. This involves identifying existing issues, bugs, problems, and opportunities within your product or organization.?Collect feedback from users, stakeholder pain point analysis, customer support tickets, funnel data, usage data and bug reports, review tools such as Zendesk, UserVoice, etc. Use analytics tools to identify patterns and trends such as Google analytics, Tableau, Mixpanel, etc.?Consider conducting Surveys and Interviews by engaging with stakeholders, including team members, customers, and partners, to gather qualitative insights.?Do Internal Audits by reviewing current workflows, internal reporting systems, processes, and other tools to pinpoint inefficiencies and areas for improvement.?Review the costs incurred through every step of your product; does anything stand out as excessive, can you reduce these costs through automation, or innovation? Utilize financials, P&Ls & budgets, working with your financial analyst to review.?Write these all up as separate problems and opportunities; if using Miro or Mural, write them up as separate Post It notes you can later sort and categorize.

WHAT IS AN ENVIRONMENTAL ANALYSIS?

An environmental analysis is a strategic tool that leaders and product managers use to understand the external factors that can impact their products and organization. This process involves examining various macro-environmental elements to identify opportunities and threats that could influence product strategy, innovation, and overall business success. By conducting an environmental analysis, leaders and product managers can develop a comprehensive understanding of the market landscape and make informed decisions that align with their vision and strategic goals.

HOW TO DO AN ENVIRONMENTAL ANALYSIS

Conducting an effective environmental analysis involves a systematic approach to gathering and analyzing data from various sources, in order to offer you and the team insights into future problems and opportunities by incorporating frameworks like STEEPLED, 3 Horizons, and megatrends, as well as understanding technology adoption.

IDENTIFYING FUTURE TECHNOLOGY AND INDUSTRY TRENDS USING THE THREE HORIZONS FRAMEWORK

The Three Horizons Framework helps you visualize and plan for future growth by categorizing trends and innovations into three distinct time frames for your industry, including tech trend adoption:

1. Horizon 1: Current trends and technologies
2. Horizon 2: Emerging trends and innovations over the next 2-5 years
3. Horizon 3: Long-term trends and potential disruptions over the next 5-10 years

STEPS TO TAKE

1. Horizon Scanning: Identify and document current and emerging trends in your industry and in technology over the next 10-15 years. Use industry reports, technology forecasts, and academic research from organisations such as Gartner, Forrester, IEEE, MIT Technology Review, Academic Journals, whitepapers and thought leaders
2. Trend Analysis: Evaluate the potential impact of these trends on your industry and product and put together a 3 horizons chart with these trends outlined.
3. Workshop Brainstorming: Incorporate these insights into your strategic planning process by engaging your team in brainstorming sessions to explore how these trends could present opportunities and problems for your product.

IDENTIFYING COMMUNITY MEGATRENDS

Megatrends are large, transformative global forces that impact society, economy, and culture over the long term. These can include demographic shifts, urbanization, climate change, and more.

STEPS TO TAKE

1. Research: Identify relevant megatrends affecting your community and industry utilising research from organisations such as the CSIRO, WEF, OECD, government reports and reports from organisations such as McKinsey, PWC & Ernst & Young to name a few.
2. Impact Analysis: Assess how these megatrends could influence your product and organization.
3. Workshop Brainstorming: Incorporate these insights into your strategic planning process by engaging your team in brainstorming sessions to explore how these trends could present opportunities and problems for your product.

CONDUCTING PESTLE, SWOT, AND FIVE FORCES ANALYSIS

Using analytical frameworks like PESTLE, SWOT, and Five Forces helps you systematically evaluate external and internal factors that can affect your organization.

1. PESTLE Analysis: Evaluates Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental factors.
2. SWOT Analysis: Identifies Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
3. Five Forces Analysis: Examines competitive forces in the industry (e.g., competition, threat of new entrants, supplier bargaining power, customer bargaining power, and the ability of customers to find substitutes for the sector's products).

STEPS TO TAKE

1. Data Collection: Gather relevant data for each framework from government publications, the CIA Factbook, IBIS World, Industry reports, internal reports & market research firms.
2. Team Workshops: Facilitate workshops where team members contribute their insights and analyses.
3. Synthesis: Compile and synthesize the findings to inform your vision and strategic planning.
4. Workshop Brainstorming: Incorporate these insights into your strategic planning process by engaging your team in brainstorming sessions to explore how these trends could present opportunities and problems for your product.

ANALYZING THE VISION & STRATEGY CASCADE IN THE ORGANISATION

In large enterprises, you are not siloed, often there are many visions and strategic goals both for the organization and for each business unit. You will need to look for and analyze this cascade around you, as your vision and strategic goals will deliver up and also affect sideways. This is an important step. Identify the organizational vision and priorities as you will deliver on these, even if it is only one part of it, you need to identify that one part clearly.?

Secondly identify your business units vision and priorities, and those units around you to see how your vision and strategy fits in and what you can deliver on.?Once you have gathered the vision cascade around you, then include this in the workshop brainstorming section. Incorporate these insights into your strategic planning process by engaging your team in brainstorming sessions to explore how these trends could present opportunities and problems for your product.

PREPARATION FOR A TEAM WORKSHOP

1. Set Objectives: Define clear objectives for the workshop.
2. Gather Materials: Collect all relevant data, reports, and analysis findings as discussed above
3. Invite Participants: Ensure a diverse group of stakeholders is involved, including team members from different departments and levels.

WORKSHOP STRUCTURE

1. Kick-off: Start with an overview of the workshop objectives and agenda.
2. Present Findings: Share the results of your discovery and analysis with the team.
3. Facilitate Silent Brainstorming:?Have everyone spend some time silently brainstorming what all of these documents mean for your product and identify the problems they will bring and the opportunities that could come to pass
4. Sort & Categorize:?Take all the problems and opportunities identified from current state and future trends and sort and categorize these, until you identify the higher level themes.
5. Strategic Goals:?Write 1-3 strategic goals, no more as that is too much work in progress and quality will decline. Your strategic goals should come from the problems and opportunities, leveraging those. It should focus you and your team on what problems to actually solve, or opportunities to leverage. You can't do all of them, so which is the most important?
6. Discussion: Encourage open dialogue, debate, and creative thinking to discuss. Identify which goals to focus on, and which goals NOT to focus on; remember if everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority.
7. Document Ideas: Capture all ideas, insights, and discussions in real-time. Using Miro or Mural is a great way to do this workshop.
8. Synthesize & Break out: Work together to synthesize and break out the strategic goals into outcomes you want to see achieved and a coherent plan based on these outcomes.

POST-WORKSHOP

1. Refine Vision & Strategic Goals: Refine the vision statement and strategy based on feedback and data or further discovery.
2. Communicate: Share the vision with the broader organization to ensure alignment and gather more feedback.
3. Action Plan: Develop an action plan for implementing the vision and strategic goals. This is your outcome based roadmap.

CONCLUSION

Leading a vision, strategy, and outcomes roadmapping workshop requires thorough preparation and analysis. By identifying current state issues, future trends, and conducting comprehensive analyses, you lay a solid foundation for your team's success. Engaging your team in collaborative workshops fosters a sense of ownership and commitment to the vision. Remember, a well-defined vision not only guides your team's efforts but also inspires and motivates them to achieve their best.