Preparing Your Product Vision

In this article I’m going to explain how to prepare your product vision.

To begin, we’re going to fill in the?Product Vision Board?that Roman Pichler created:

I’m going to borrow an example from a previous role I worked in to demonstrate how to fill in the Product Vision Board in order to work your way towards coming up with your Product Vision.

This example is the?Pocketbook?mobile app, available within Australia. Let’s say its old vision was to “Become the Number One mobile app in Australia for Tracking Expenses and Budgeting”.

However, to date the app (which is owned by a larger payments company) has been a cost centre to the business, as it produces no revenue. A business goal has thus been formulated by the Strategy team within the payments company to “Commercialise Pocketbook”.

We’re going to work our way through filling in this canvas (or board) within a workshop. In order to do this, we must pull together a cross-functional team of stakeholders from the business (representatives from UX/Design, Engineering & Business) and book an hour long workshop session into their diaries.

Assuming we’re doing this in person, we can begin by giving each attendee a small booklet of post-it notes and a marker. Or, if we’re doing it remotely we can use an online tool like?Miro?to fill in a virtual board with virtual post-its.

And then we can kick things off by explaining to everyone:

1. Why they’re in the room:?To help come up with a new direction for Pocketbook;
2. The background behind what we’re trying to achieve:?An overview of the history and functionality, perhaps the old vision of Pocketbook and the business goal that we previously described — Commercialisation of the App; and
3. Our planned approach:?Working our way through filling in the Product Vision Board.

We then seed the board with a post-it note over on the far right, under Business Goals, answering the second of the two questions noted within that section:

1. What are the business goals? —?“Commercialise Pocketbook”

And then open up the floor to allow the rest of the room to add their own thoughts to the first of these two questions:

1. How is the product going to benefit the company?

Some examples for this one could include:

1. Cross-Sell Payment Solution to Pocketbook Users
2. New Revenue Streams
3. Use of Expense Data in Credit Decisioning
4. Develop Fingerprint from Expense Data for KYC

Time-box this exercise of gathering post-it notes, and when the time runs out or no-one can come up with any more ideas, progress to brainstorming the next element — the Target Group (on the far left).

Ultimately for the Target Group(s) — you want to come up with high-level descriptors of personas, as a group. Ask the group in the room who the existing users of Pocketbook (or the product) are — if it already exists. Or if it doesn’t exist, try and brainstorm who the potential target group(s) might be.

Some examples from Pocketbook include:

1. Student
2. Homekeeper
3. Professional
4. Tradesperson

And once you have defined your target group(s), ask the group to brainstorm (using post-its) the needs of these users. This requires that the group empathise with the target groups. What journeys do they undertake in their day to day? What pain points do they experience, and what challenges must they undertake?

In the case of Pocketbook, looking at the target group(s) of Student and Homekeeper — a core need was to “Save Money” and “Save Money Whilst Spending Money”, as well as “Understand Where I’m Spending My Money” and “Ensuring I don’t Spend More Money Than I Have”.

Focussing on the core need (or problem) of “Saving Money”, allows the group to progress to the next element that needs to be populated — Product.

But before answering the question of what the product is (with post-its), we need to, as a group, come up with a hypothesis. Such as “By providing people with opportunities to save money, at places that they already shop, we help them to save money”.

From this, we can ask the group to brainstorm and write on their post-its ideas for “What product is it?” based on the defined hypothesis.

Some ideas that your group might come up with include:

1. Cash-Back for Online Purchases at Places People Haven’t Visited
2. Cash-Back for Online Purchases at Places People Have Visited (Based on their Expenses)
3. Cash-Back for In-Store Purchases at Places People Haven’t Visited
4. Cash-Back for In-Store Purchases at Places People Have Visited (Based on their Expenses) — Whilst Paying With Registered Card
5. Immediate Discount Online or In-Store at Time of Purchase Using Coupon

And “What makes it stand-out” for one of the above items could be:

1. Cash-Back In-Store Using Registered Card

Now that we’ve filled out all of the columns at the bottom of the board, we can ask the group to write on their post-its, responses to the two questions in the top row:

1. What is your motivation for creating the product?
2. What positive change should it bring about?

And the group might come up with different motivations like:

1. To help us commercialise Pocketbook

And positive changes like:

1. Help users save money where they already spend

From this we can derive a new vision for the product, like:

To commercialise Pocketbook by helping users save money at stores where they are already spending.

With this being placed into the top row of the board.

I hope this helps you understand how you might approach defining a new vision for a product that you already have.

Originally posted on the Blog of Darren Smith: