AMA: Atlassian Product Leader, Enterprise Agility, Samantha Ugulava on Product Vision

A product vision statement is a short, concise, and aspirational set of goals for your product. As a Product Manager, you will need to develop a deep understanding of your company, customers, compeititors, and teammates. Research will depend entirely on your level of understanding of these areas.  For the past 2 years, I led the Confluence Content Experience team at Atlassian. My team owned the creating and publishing workflow and our product vision statement looked like this: Our goal is to hel ...Read More

Great product visions rally a team around a set of clear and concise goals. That vision represents the team's focus and can be a helpful tool when the team needs to make a decision or is starting to be misaligned.  In college, I had a marketing professor who was known by a simple tagline: "Lose your focus. Lose your shirt." No matter how much experience you have building products, it's so easy to get distracted and start to solving problems without proper validation. As Product Managers, it's ou ...Read More

In my experience, I've found the best way to successfully pivot your product vision is to make sure your stakeholders are clear on the why, when, and how. Part of bringing a vision to life is rallying your team and getting your stakeholders excited about what's to come. In my last three roles, I've been hired to lead product teams that have recently gone through a lot of turnover. The designers and engineers appear to be skeptical of product, demoralized, and disconnected from the rest of the or ...Read More

I think the biggest difference between crafting software vs. hybrid product vision statements comes down to scale. It's much faster to build, test, and learn with software product than products that touch hardware. With software, you can scale your product and customer base very quickly, whereas, hardware can take months, or even years to iterate and drive value.  Over the course of my career, I've worked on mobile, web, and hybrid (mobile + hardware) products. A few years ago, I worked at Hudl ...Read More