There are no shortcuts for succeeding. It takes self-discipline, focus, hard work, and humility. Another key element for thriving in any business is to work on something that makes sense to you and brings value. Many product teams are not working meaningfully, as they lack an inspiring Product Vision. There are a lot of them that are working to get some features done, and others are following whatever the management wants or doing what the development team thinks makes more sense. If you’re doing this and you think it is working well, please, keep doing it. However, if you want your product to touch the sky, you’ll need an inspiring vision that gets your team together around a common goal. All stakeholders should be aligned on it and, ultimately, everyone will be inspired to create great products that people will love.
Some Example of Vision Statements
Product Retrospective: “To empower product people to create better products.”
IKEA: “To create a better everyday life for the many people.”
Workday: “To put people at the center of enterprise software.”
What is a Product Vision
Inspirational, emotional, visionary, human. The Product Vision is the ultimate motivation for creating a product and defines a dream of realizing something great, an optimal desire for the future state. Would you like to work for a product without understanding why you do it? A product vision gives you a direction, a reason, and inspires you to achieve great things on the way to make it real. The Product Vision is aligned with the company vision and empowers everyone to understand how his or her work is bringing a whole organization together to achieve an inspiring goal.
As Roman Pichler puts it in his book “How to Lead in Product Management” ”Life is too short to work on a product you don’t find meaningful”.
Why is important to have a product vision?
As described before, the whole thing about a vision is to know what our product’s end goal is, and to get all the stakeholders aligned on it. Having a product vision increases the feeling of meaningfulness, as people know what they are working for, and this brings several benefits to your product:
- People will be working happier, more motivated because they have a clear idea of why they are doing what they are doing.
- Consequently, the fluctuation rate of a company goes down, which saves a lot of money and retains talented people, that are important to make great products.
- Another benefit is, it increases the sense of ownership in the teams. By knowing why they are working on something, they also do it the best way they can, as they want to achieve that vision.
- Through this sense of ownership, people start having great ideas and speaking up,
- Knowing where we want to go as a product, helps the development teams to better plan and, for instance, to make smarter decisions today, that will enable decisions that may come in the future.
- Another advantage of this ownership feeling, is that people will be more able to challenge each other with questions as “how is that bringing us closer to our vision”? Which is very important. The more you challenge ideas, the better validated they go to the next phase.
- Last but not least, every stakeholder knows in which direction we want to go as a product. This way they can come up with suggestions, or better understand product decisions.
User Personas for empathising with our customers and taking better product decisions