Product Vision or Product Strategy?

What is the secret to doing more with less?

For Ken Knoll, an independent product advisor and interim CPO out of Berlin, the answer is to not do the unimportant things.?

And how do you know what is unimportant?? By having a vision and a strategy.

The Product Vision serves as a guiding light on the horizon, describing the ideal customer experience you want to achieve in the future. When aligned, these two elements motivate and unify teams.? The product vision answers questions like why am I doing what I'm doing? Why is this important? Why should I even be doing it? ?

The strategy, on the other hand, maps out the most effective path to reach this vision. ??It answers questions like what's important now? What's not important?

And then we can move onto how can we best do that?? (That’s when we dive into rapid experimentation).

When Ken starts working with a company, he begins with trying to determine which of these two, Product Vision or Product Strategy will help this company more at this moment in time.? Sometimes, it helps to dive into the vision first.? Sometimes it helps to dive into the strategy.

One example is an EdTech company that he has worked with.? This company has an amazing vision:? democratizing education. ?They want to give people access to education to help them grow. ?And that's amazing. ?The world needs education. ?This is an inspiring product vision.

But the company lacked alignment.? What does this vision mean?? What do we focus on now? Do we need to build this? ?Or that? ?Should we focus on personalization??

While both Product Vision and Product Strategy can drive alignment and direction, in this case, focusing on Product Strategy was the more effective path to move this company forward at that time.?

And this is not a one-time exercise.? Not letting other projects get on the roadmap is like keeping weeds from overtaking a garden.? Removing the weeds is not a one-off exercise, but an ongoing practice.?

The only way to make a strong Product Strategy last is to help people distinguish between fluff and critical items needed to execute the Product Strategy in order to arrive at the Product Vision.? Stakeholders cannot put things on the roadmap because they want them.? We need to apply a strategic lens.? ?