AMA: GitLab Director of Product Management, Jacqueline Porter on Product Vision

Love this question! Planning for product vision is usually done in 3 horizons: 10 years, 3 years, and 1 year. The 10-year vision is your guiding, north-star approach that will help guide all other investments overtime. The 3-year vision is a little more actionable and will help shape what the execution plan needs to be. 1 year vision is execution based on what can be accomplished in that current year.

Both product lifecycles require a strong long-term vision in order to effectively motivate the team and attract users. Without a strong vision, the 0 to 1 product would not be able to focus on goals/exit criteria for launch while the mature product would get stuck in a routine problem-solving approach with the existing base.

1. Who will I serve? 2. What problems do those individuals/businesses/target market face on a day to day basis? 3. What gaps exist in the industry today? 4. How are people solving pain points today? 5. Are people happy with current solutions? I like my visions to be very focused on the customer and solving a clear problem. This will also help identify product-market fit early on, guiding development on principles and feedback.

I don't usually have metrics to validate the vision, because usually the execution plan and product adoption will tell the story of if it resonates with the market. Interviews and qualitative data are nice inputs to the product vision and help validate if the word choice is appropriate. Some examples of qualitative data: 1. Interviews with ideal users of products 2. Survey on word choice and usage associations 3. Prototype responses with vision statements

Interviews with prospects, interviews with analysts, industry reports, industry conference talks, prototyping, experimentation, and whitepapers. All of these resources help provide context on the landscape and help inform what will be the most useful in context to the existing market and challenges. To be more reactive, experimentation enables fast feedback loops on solutions, while prototyping allows for minimized risk of a negative reaction from the end user. I try to have a well-rounded approach with many sensing mechanisms to shape the vision.