AMA: Anima Chief Product Officer, Orit Golowinski on Product Vision

When creating a product vision for a 0-1 product, the focus is primarily on finding the right product-market fit. This phase involves investing significant time in user research, deeply understanding the problem your users face, and identifying their pain points. The goal is to come up with an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) that is good enough to launch while also being flexible enough to evolve. Recruiting design partners and consistently iterating on the vision is key in this stage. It’s important not to get too attached to the original vision, as many pivots can happen during 0-1. Continuous learning and the ability to act quickly are crucial to success. While understanding the market potential and competitors is important, you may also be creating a new market, making it more challenging to predict trends and identify emerging competitors. As the product grows and matures, the product vision also matures. In this stage, the emphasis shifts to validating which features, functionalities, and packaging add the most value to users and the business. The focus is often on retention, expansion, and revenue growth. It becomes increasingly important to monitor market trends and user behavior to identify opportunities for value improvement. This is also the time to assess when to invest further in expanding a successful product or when to sunset features or technologies that are outdated or have limited user appeal. Maintaining old technology or underused features can hurt the business by diverting resources, so it’s essential to keep optimizing. At this stage, staying informed about competitors is key, ensuring you leverage any new competitive advantages. The goal for a mature product is to remain a cash cow, continuing to deliver value to users and impact the business positively. This requires continuously improving, growing the user base, and increasing revenue while keeping a close eye on market trends and evolving needs.

1. Understand the current product vision and why it’s not working: This usually stems from a lack of product-market fit. It’s important to identify the gaps and why the current vision is failing to resonate with users. 2. Talk to users: Engage with as many users as possible to understand their pain points and the core problems they need solved. This insight is crucial to shaping the new vision. 3. Understand the market: Analyze the Total Addressable Market (TAM), identify competitors, and learn what's working for them and what isn’t. This will give you a clearer understanding of the space you’re operating in. 4. Consult experts: Talk to people who are knowledgeable about the space—investors, VCs, former colleagues, other product leaders, and experts. Gather their perspectives on the market and the potential for success with a new vision. 5. Brainstorm with stakeholders: Collaborate with key stakeholders, including founders, engineering leaders, the extended product team, and the marketing team to brainstorm potential pivots. 6. Decide on the new pivot and validate it: Once a new direction is identified, validate it through user research. Make sure it addresses real user needs and aligns with the insights gathered from the market. 7. Write the new product vision statement: Clearly articulate the new long-term vision for the product. 8. Stakeholder Alignment: After writing down the new product vision and before proceeding with the MVP, it can be helpful to ensure alignment with all key stakeholders—executives, board members, and the broader team. Getting everyone on the same page regarding the new direction can prevent potential misalignment down the road. 9. Define the MVP: Decide on the minimum viable product (MVP) that you’ll need to start validating the new vision. 10. Defining Success Metrics Early: When defining the MVP, it’s useful to also outline clear success metrics upfront. What does success look like for this new pivot? It could be user adoption rates, revenue milestones, or customer feedback. These metrics will guide the evaluation of the new pivot and help you determine when it’s time to double down or pivot again. 11. Build a POC with engineering: Work closely with the engineering team to quickly build a proof of concept (POC) for the MVP. 12. Present the MVP to key stakeholders: Present the MVP to investors, colleagues, customers, and prospects. Revalidate the solution through their feedback. 13. Assess willingness to pay: See if customers are willing to pay for the solution. This will help gauge market interest and potential success. 14. Evaluate the pivot: If the feedback is positive, proceed forward. If not, be ready to pivot again and quickly move in a new direction. Throughout this process, speed is critical. If at any point it becomes clear that the new pivot isn’t the right solution, it’s important to pivot again as soon as possible.

When creating a product vision, it’s important to capture the "why" behind what you're building. These are the key questions I ask myself: 1. Who is the product for? The vision must be customer-focused. Understanding who you're building for is the foundation of a successful product vision. 2. What problem are we trying to solve? This extends to assessing what other solutions exist and what workarounds people are using today to address this problem. A clear understanding of the problem sets the stage for the vision. 3. Is this achievable? The vision should be ambitious and inspirational—like a stretch goal—but still attainable. It should motivate the team to be excited about what they are building while ensuring the goals are realistic. 4. Is this clear and concise? Your vision should be easy to understand. If your non-technical friends can grasp it, it means you’ve communicated it clearly. 5. What is our solution’s competitive edge? Why would users choose this product over others? Understanding your product’s unique value proposition is key to standing out in the market.

Day-to-day work is often busy and intense, and it’s easy to get distracted by shiny new features, security issues, customer requests, complaints, refactoring, and other improvements. The product vision, which should be well-documented, serves as a guiding compass to help rise above the daily noise and balance priorities. It sets the course for achieving long-term goals and ensures focus on what matters most. When something doesn’t fit the vision, working on it can slow down progress. There may be times when it’s necessary to accommodate customer demands or secure a large deal, but it’s essential to be fully aware of the trade-offs. Every decision should have a clear "why" behind it, ensuring the team understands how their work aligns with the broader vision. The product vision also helps align the entire company, including non-engineering teams like customer success and marketing, so that everyone is working towards the same goal. This alignment ensures that cross-functional teams are pulling in the same direction, reducing conflicts and improving efficiency. For example, I recently worked with a short-staffed engineering team, and our focus was on shifting security left to developers. Our product’s vision centered on creating an excellent developer experience by meeting developers where they are and reducing friction when handling security findings. This meant integrating security directly into the developer’s workflow, such as in their IDE and pull requests. With every new request or feature suggestion, whether from customers or leadership, the first question we asked was, “Does this help improve the developer experience?” If the answer was no, we added it to the backlog. If the answer was yes, we discussed and prioritized it. This alignment with our vision became our north star and guided us in making better day-to-day prioritization decisions. Ultimately, the product vision helps teams stay focused and ensures their daily decisions align with the long-term goals of the product. By consistently referencing the vision, the team can avoid distractions and work on what truly matters, leading to better outcomes for both the product and the business.

It depends on the maturity of the company, the product, and whether there is product-market fit. At GitLab, for instance, we had a long-term vision that spanned 10 years, serving as a general statement of the direction we wanted to achieve over that time. This was a high-level guide, offering broad direction. Bringing this down to a more tangible level, the section directors focused on a 3-year plan, still high-level but with specific metrics (like revenue targets) that we aspired to reach. For yearly goals, group managers consolidated the vision for their stage, and individual product managers (ICs) created yearly, quarterly, and monthly plans for their groups. We frequently updated the monthly direction to ensure transparency and keep us on track. You can see more about this approach here. For smaller startups that haven’t yet found product-market fit and may need to pivot often, such a structured process may not be necessary. It’s crucial to have a long-term vision that gives the team a sense of mission and purpose, but a detailed 3-year plan can be too rigid. Instead, the vision should focus more on milestones - such as securing the next funding round, reaching general availability (GA), or hitting key growth targets - rather than fixed timeframes. However, even for startups, it is still important to set quarterly goals and metrics. These shorter-term objectives provide focus and allow teams to track progress more effectively. Quarterly goals help ensure the company is moving in the right direction, even if the long-term vision might evolve. As the company matures and gains stability, the vision can evolve to incorporate longer-term goals and more precise timelines. Flexibility is key in the early stages, while structure becomes more valuable as the company and product mature.

I joined Anima recently, and here’s the approach I used during onboarding: * Understand the Product and Market: Review product features, the roadmap, customer feedback, and analyze the competitive landscape to identify opportunities. * Assess Development and Metrics: Evaluate development processes, methodologies, and key metrics to identify gaps and areas for improvement. * Refine the Product Vision: Collaborate with the executive team to align the product vision with company goals and ensure it reflects customer needs and market trends. * Engage with Customers and Market: Conduct customer interviews and stay updated on market and competitor movements to validate the vision. * Execute and Iterate: Develop a clear roadmap, track progress against metrics, adjust the strategy based on feedback, and foster a culture of continuous improvement. Tying this specifically to Anima: When I joined Anima, I first focused on learning the product. Anima’s original vision was to automate design to code. The company began 7 years ago, serving designers using Sketch and Adobe XD to quickly create demos, marketing materials, and landing pages—primarily for designers with minimal development experience. As the company evolved, Anima pivoted to supporting Figma and bridging the gap between designers and developers. Designers and developers often face frustration because their tools and methodologies differ, leading to code that diverges from the original design vision. This led to a new focus on catering to developers - a brand-new persona for Anima, with different requirements. Despite Anima’s strong reputation within the design community, it was less known among developers. Additionally, the rise of AI presented an opportunity to automate some of the tedious tasks frontend developers face, such as converting design elements (fonts, colors, etc.) into reusable CSS. We researched the developer persona, talked to customers and prospects, and uncovered key insights about their use cases, pain points, and needs. We realized that to succeed with developers, we needed to meet them where they work, which is not in Figma. This led us to plan and build a new product in VS Code to help with the translation of design to code. Throughout this process, validating the new direction with key stakeholders, including the founders and the board, was essential. Setting clear metrics and regularly reviewing progress ensured we were on the right track. Lastly, staying closely connected to customers, design partners, and prospects while building the vision is crucial. As product managers, it's easy to fall in love with our ideas, but the right solution must always address the customer’s real needs.