Why do you need a product vision?
It is easy to say that strategy and vision are the domain of the top executives in the company, not a place for the product management to dwell in. Product management should be focused on defining the feature requirements or user stories (as is more trendy currently and more on that on a later post), competitive analysis, positioning and marketing collateral. However I have found that going back to the drawing board and crafting a vision and a strategy for the product (here I am talking about product and services interchangeably) allows you to reflect how is your product aligned with the overall organisational strategy and vision. As the first step of your vision and strategy crafting should be to read, digest and embody the corporate strategy and vision. This is a necessary step to ensure that the product that you are building is aligned with the rest of the company. For example if your company strategy and vision is build around the statement “we save you time”, it means that building a product that has the most elaborate and detailed feature set and functionality would not be aligned with that statement as more features, more functionality takes time to navigate to and executing all those takes again more time.
Why would this be harmful?
There are multiple reasons which range from -
1. Company and product positioning and messaging conflict
2. Confusing the customers about what they would be getting from you. Especially if other product stringently adhere to the overall vision
3. Uncomfortable discussions about pricing as with the above example saving time and thus money and having the most feature-rich product seldom meet the clients pricing expectation for time saving solutions with the product management’s need for gross margins that are healthy for feature-rich products.
4. Confusing and potentially having the wrong sales force in place for your product
What are then the positive aspects of working on the product vision?
1. Having to read and understand the organisational vision and strategy works as a building block for career advancement. You better understand what decisions are made higher up
2. Leveraging the overall vision and strategy helps you to create your own by not having to start from scratch and work on enhancing the existing vision to support your own product vision. As an example if we you the previous example of saving time and most feature-rich the product vision could state something like “fastest access to necessary functionality”, which combines the time saving AND feature richness.
3. Via communicating and enforcing the product vision to your stakeholders holders such marketing, development and sales teams it allows them to make right decisions without constantly consulting you of the every last minute detail.These can be such topics as - sales identifying the right customers and not chasing leads that would never be true fits for your product, development team being able to choose between multiple technology choices as the embedded requirement of “fastest access to necessary functionality” is always there to guide them without having had that explicitly written down and discussed for this particular feature requirement.
4. It serves yourself as a constant internal tool for reflection when considering new feature requests from clients, sales, internally developed. It also helps you to identify what OKRs/KPIs/metrics are the most suitable to measure and monitor your success in executing that vision to become a reality.
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As the Subject Matter Expert the product manager is also able to bring the unique view of the product market context in to the product vision. These could take inputs from Market, Technology and Industry trends that the product is designed to serve.
Some useful links to explore:
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