Purpose and Function: A parable about creating a product's Vision and Strategy

Worst. Planning. Ever.

Read the entire article on Substack.

Fog shrouded the upper floors of a downtown San Francisco highrise. Inside, a product team sat in a conference room, their mood as gloomy as the summer weather blowing past the streaked picture window. On a clear day, the room looked out over a glorious view of The City’s Northwest corner, including the Presidio, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay, and the Marin Headlands beyond. As it was late May, those days were weeks, perhaps months away.

We chose the room because of its inspiring view. The inspiration would have benefited our current task, mapping the future of our product. As it was, we were stuck. Our usually cohesive unit was bickering, frustration growing as the conversation progressed. Constructive debate had long ago devolved into contentious arguments and threatened to turn caustic.

The team simply could not agree on which initiatives were most important, and each product manager had a pet project they believed was essential to our future success. As team members made their case, the difference between the products and their impact on customers became nearly indistinguishable.

As their leader, I had failed at the crucial task of setting our Purpose and creating the context for our ongoing debates. We had started with ‘how we will solve customer problems,’ so we lacked context, an organizing principle, and our Why. Without Purpose, we had no basis for comparing the relative importance of each product manager’s insistent pleas for preeminence.

I called the meeting. There was no sense in debating tactical priorities set against an opaque outcome. We agreed on some action items, and I retreated to lick my wounds, angry with myself and stung by failure. Our grand roadmap would have to wait.

Three things happened next.

First, I wrote what I believed was the product Vision and Strategy and assembled the team to debate and validate them. (Later, I would learn to write Vision and Strategy statements more collaboratively with my team.) From that meeting, a plan emerged to communicate constantly about the Vision and Strategy, so everyone would be on the same (okay, maybe just a similar) page when we resumed the roadmap discussion.

Second, I learned that planning is a continuous process, not an event. For a while, every Friday, we held a Vision/Strategy ‘Ask Me Anything’ forum. Anyone, even people outside of the product organization, could participate live or engage asynchronously through a chat channel. We kept at it until team members could reflexively repeat the Vision and Strategy.

Then, the roadmap conversation proceeded organically, without an elaborate multi-day meeting. Team members' conversations became more aligned and collaborative, and they frequently worked out that if Team A did Task 1 and Team B did Task 2, we would achieve Outcome Y, a milestone on the path to our Vision.?

My role as chief roadmap adjudicator–which I passionately hated—quietly faded away. Instead, I could focus on aligning the team to our Purpose, establishing Why we were building our product, and crafting a Vision the market could believe in.

Function vs Purpose

In one of this newsletter’s first articles, Why bikes have brakes: A software development parable , I touched briefly on the concepts of Function and Purpose. It’s easy to confuse the two, and knowing the difference is essential to building products that matter.

The concept goes something like this: A bike’s Purpose is to go fast. So, what is the Purpose of the brakes? People usually answer that the brakes' Purpose is to stop the bike. But the brakes’ real Purpose is to help the bike go fast safely. The brakes’ Function is to stop the bike.?

From there, it’s easy to work out how the brakes should perform that Function, for example, by applying friction to a rotating wheel so the rider can modulate speed.

Now, let’s explore the concepts of Purpose and Function in more detail, this time in the context of building your product’s Vision and Strategy...

Read the rest of this article on Substack.