Setting a vision for the team is one of the most important responsibilities of the product manager. Setting a vision is not the same thing as being a “visionary”. When I first read that a PM sets the vision for a product, I thought, “How on earth does one develop the skill to be a Steve Jobs or Elon Musk? If it were that easy, everyone would do it!” The thing is that every PM owns the vision for their feature, product, portfolio of products, or company. The VP of product or head of product for a company probably needs to be a visionary, at least for the space in which that division or company operates. Being a vision owner does not mean defining the next computing platform for a billion people or making humans a multi-planetary species. It can be as “simple” as defining the future of videoconferencing, the future of online commerce, or the future of photo taking. For a junior PM who owns a feature or a set of features in a product, defining the vision would mean the future state of that set of features.
What is a vision?
A vision is a description of a future state of the world, more specifically, the slice of the world that is impacted by the product. What should the world be like? How should a user need be met in the ideal state? A vision does not need to consist of whiz-bang features or zero-to-one technology development. For example, Zoom’s vision is “Video communications empowering people to accomplish more”.
A vision should be aspirational and difficult to achieve. An ambitious vision might take many years or even decades to achieve. At the same time, a vision should be attainable with sufficient time, talent, and investment. It might require the development of technologies that don’t exist today or massive levels of investment, but a product vision must be achievable within the known laws of physics. For example, “colonizing Mars” is achievable within the laws of physics, with sufficient investment. “Colonizing the planet orbiting the star Gliese 581” is not achievable within the known laws of physics, even with infinite dollars. The best product managers are able to articulate a vision that is compelling, impactful if achieved, yet just outside the realm of what the engineering team believes is possible.
It should be possible to articulate a product vision in just 2-3 short sentences. This is known as the vision statement. This is the version that everyone on the team should know. It should be punchy, easy to remember, and paint a picture in the reader’s mind. This vision statement is what the individual contributors on a team will remember. It is what the team will describe as their purpose to customers, partners, and future employees.
The vision statement can be unpacked into long form artifacts. This might take the form of a 2-4 page narrative document, a visual slide deck, or a vision video. Each of these forms serve different purposes and audiences. The narrative document serves as a “double-click” on the vision statement. The audience is the team. The team will not remember nor necessarily internalize the details of the narrative document, but will need to see the detailed user scenarios, user problems, and solutions that the product will deliver. On the other hand, upcoming leaders on the team will analyze the long-form narrative in-depth and will rightfully ask tough questions about the vision. Spend time with these people. They will help you sharpen your vision.
A vision deck should be heavy on visuals. A PM will craft a vision deck with heavy input and collaboration with the design teams (User Experience team for software products, Industrial Design and User Experience for hardware products). A vision deck will take significant time and effort to craft. The PM should describe the user scenarios and product solutions verbally or as short written sketches, and work closely with the design teams to translate these into visuals. A vision deck is useful to rally the team at all-hands (pictures truly are worth a thousand words), drive pitches and kickoffs with partner companies (and partner organizations within the same company), and recruit new employees to the team. Many concepts are also much easier to convey visually, especially for zero-to-one products.
A vision video is often created with the help of an external agency. The PM and design teams will work with a creative agency to translate a vision deck into a short “sizzle reel”. There are two traps that PMs fall into when working on vision videos. First, they must strike a careful balance between venturing too far into science-fiction territory and not being sufficiently ambitious. I call this the “Star Trek” trap. For example, modern day iPads are sleeker, faster, and more useful than the “pads” used in Star Trek (both The Original Series or The Next Generation). On the other hand, transporter rooms and warp drive are impossible within our known laws of physics.
Second, vision videos often end up demonstrating visually “cool” flows and experiences that actually make for terrible products. For example, the “hand gestures” user interface in the movie Minority Report looks cool on film, but is an incredibly poor ergonomic interface because most people cannot keep their arms at shoulder height for more than a few seconds before getting fatigued.
How do you come up with a vision?
This is one of the hardest skills for a PM to pick up. I don’t have this figured out myself, but can offer a few tips.
Think like a startup founder
Paul Graham has written extensively on the topic of good startup ideas, and it’s worth reading some of his essays on this topic. Good startup ideas are intellectually equivalent to good product visions. Some of the mind hacks described by Paul to find good startup ideas can also be used to define compelling visions for your product or feature.
10x your product
What would your product look like if it were “10X’ed” on some dimension? What would it look like if it were 10 times faster? 10 times smaller? Served 10 times the users it serves now? Extrapolating your product features along some dimension can elicit insights on a compelling vision.
Go deep on user needs
Think deeply about your customers’ needs. Get super specific. What jobs do they need to get done? How well does your product (or competitor products) serve those needs? What would the perfect solution look like? Go through the user flows in excruciating detail, optimizing, pruning, streamlining.
Creative thinking tools
Edward de Bono coined the term “lateral thinking” in the 1960s and is a leading thinker about thinking. Consider leveraging his tools about thinking, such as the Six Thinking Hats, Random Entry Idea Generating Tool, Provocation Idea Generating Tool, and Challenge Idea Generating Tool.
What next?
Keep writing because writing is thinking. Write down your ideas, observations, insights. This practice will build your visionary muscles. You’ll begin to question assumptions of how the world is, and develop points of view on how the world should be. Once you have done this, you will be able to generate ideas on products and services to build that will realize this world.