Product Management

Vision crafting

Tangible Tips for Creating a Product Vision from Next to Nothing.

Throughout my career, I’ve had the opportunity to take a variety of roles that inform my approach to product management. Making my way through ticket queues, redundant test plans, insatiable backlogs, less than pretty roadmaps, and now into the realm of senior management, I’ve had a valuable (albeit unwanted) friend by my side: obscurity. Without fail, every project I have ever worked on — whether self-directed or handed to me by an executive — has been laced with at least some notion of being unclear, intangible, and vague …. you know — lacking the details.

Much of the time the imperative to go and do is preceded by just one line or concept. The antecedent isn’t much more than the artifacts of a glimpse into a potential reality. I want to be clear — this is not a bad thing. Any effort to tackle something worth doing has to start somewhere and that somewhere is usually nothing more than notes on a napkin, one-liners, or just a short unformatted paragraph.

At other times, despite previous work, the trajectory of long-standing project may feel aimless, without purpose, or adrift in a vast ocean. It can often feel insurmountable. Product managers are called to create order from what could be considered a mess of ideas and desires — this is not easy to do.

What we are talking about here is vision crafting. Vision crafting is the process of arriving at a product vision which seeks to lay out a picture for the next few years of work ahead of product. This is distinct from product strategy, which is the process on how to get there. Marty Cagan from Silicon Valley Product Group does a good job of drawing this distinction. Creating a clear vision for your product is one of the best things you can do to align a team and gain some momentum when starting a new project or initiative.

A mature product vision takes time. It may look like a single product vision statement, which is the approach Product Board took, or it could be a multi-faceted description of goals. In my opinion, a product vision should be more complex than a simple statement — it should provide a tangible picture from which design & development can begin.