Design Team Strategy #5

Crafting a vision that inspires

A team vision is the North Star that guides a design team’s collective efforts toward a shared purpose and ultimate goal.

Created with Microsoft Designer. Prompt: “A starry night sky with one especially bright star, like the North Star, pixel art.”

This is the fifth and last in a series of articles dealing with the development of a comprehensive strategy for a design team:

1. The strategy house: how to define a design team’s mission
2. Pillars, objectives, and OGSMs: how to define a design team’s most important topics
3. Team values: the foundation of any strategy
4. Designing together: the importance of shared principles for design teams
5. ☞ Crafting a vision that inspires

In product design, like in business in general, success isn’t just about achieving that milestone next month, and then the next milestone the month after that. It’s about realizing a collective vision and making sure those milestones contribute to it. A team vision serves as a North Star a team can refer to in times of ambiguity and/or uncertainty in order to ensure everyone is working towards the same ultimate goal(s), based on a shared purpose and values.

But what exactly is a team vision, and why is it crucial? And how does it differ from the topics we’ve covered in previous articles — mission, goals, values, and principles? In this fifth and final part of our series on developing a comprehensive strategy for a design team, we dive into the absolutely crucial role of a team vision and how we developed one that accurately represents our aspirations as a team.

Understanding Team Vision

Before getting to the hands-on part, let’s first reiterate a bit the basics of what a team vision is and why it’s so important in the context of a team (or organizational) strategy.

What Does a Good Vision Statement Look Like?

A team vision statement can come in many forms — and there is no one template or blueprint — but is a clear and concise statement that describes what a team hopes to achieve in the long term (Bennett, 2021). It goes beyond just describing what the team does or what…