Product Vision — Injecting Soul and Character for Your Product
It’s near the end of quarter 4 2020, which means: planning time!
If you are a product manager, this must be a busy period for you. It is a time for us to slow down in implementation, reflect, and look back to celebrate the success and learn from mistakes in the past. Also, building up case studies, analysis, and customer pain points to formulate product planning and putting up project backlog for the team.
But, for me, product planning is more than just gathering data, weighting the impact and effort, make 2x2 metrics, and then prioritize. If we do this, we are no different than just a machine, a factory of features. It feels rigid and uninspiring. It’s boring!
While as a product manager, it’s necessary to have a strong prioritization skill; to say no to things, what makes product management truly exciting is that we have the liberty to create our own vision and inspire the whole team to move together!
I don’t want to save the world. I just want to think about the future and not be sad. — Elon Musk
There comes, product vision.
Product vision, for me, is an art. It’s the art of injecting soul and character into our product. To “humanize” and “characterize” our product, creating direction and differentiation.
Imagine that you explain your product like this: “Tokopedia is a place for a stranger to buy things from other strangers” vs “Tokopedia is here to democratize commerce through technology”. The second sentence brings weight and inspiration to the team and the readers. It moves people’s hearts.
Below is one of my favorite product vision: Tesla master’s plan, part Deux
Gosh, what a beauty right? It was written by Elon Musk in the year 2006, and this “simple” plan has been the company’s direction up until now!
So, how do we create one?
Art-science approach
Creating a product vision is not as easy as it looks. It requires a deep understanding of the customers, products, industry, and competitors. So what we need to do is to understand the root of our product, by answering questions:
- Who are our customers? What is the segment that we’d like to focus on? What are their top pain points? How’s their behavior?
- What are the most critical things do we want to achieve in the next year(s)? — max 3
- How does our product contribute to a bigger society (or to a bigger product group)?
- Constantly asking: what are the things that really matter?
- [Other]
You must be thinking: As a product manager, we must have known the answers to these questions. But wait a minute! Knowing vs understanding is different.
Understanding requires second-level thinking about your product. It distills the most important insight and summarizes it into few words nicely. Only knowing could lead you to the pitfall of creating a bunch of backlogs, overflooding the audience and yourself with data and insights.
Therefore, creating product vision is a combination of a deep understanding of the data, while also the ability to do storytelling (re: connecting the dots in a nice way) to our product, to make it more understandable and convincing.
Also, one secret tip, don’t forget to inject your “hunch” into the product. Sometimes, we already know what to do. Hunch could lead you to the unexpected! — see Steve Jobs ;) You might not agree with the hunch part. But I don’t care.
Clarity & focus
One of the most important qualities of a good product vision is that it brings clarity to the team. It brings clarity on: (a) what to achieve, (b) steps to achieve it, (c) when to achieve it.
We don’t want to give too ambiguous product vision and leave our team lost in it. Product vision must act as a guideline for operating, and guiding people’s thinking framework. It should be able to unify the team.
We also want product vision to sharpen the focus of your team. As product managers, we will never run out of problems and things to do. There are tons of things to be done. Our job is to sharpen the focus of our team. To ignore the unnecessary, and focus on what really matters.
Always double-check again and again the product vision whether it’s understandable and whether it brings clarity to your team. Gain as much feedback as you could. The vision should be owned by everyone, not by yourself only.
Conclusion
- The product vision is important to guide and inspire the team.
- Adopt the first-principle, create a deep understanding of your product.
- But also don’t forget your hunch and common sense. It could lead you to unexpected things.
- Good product vision MUST NOT be complicated. It should give clarity, guideline, and sharpen the focus of your team!
- The vision should be owned by everyone, not by yourself only.
