AMA: Oracle Director of Product, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Devika Nair on Product Vision

A bad vision statement is one that is either too narrow or too broad. It is hard to get a vision statement right, but you need it to be ambitious, but believable. It needs to address what you are trying to achieve. Few reasons why it can be a bad vision statement include: 1. Too long. You want the vision statement to be memorable, not an essay. Pick what is relevant. 2. Trying to solve all problems and not providing a direction. 3. Trying to sound good instead of talking about what your product should try to do.

Something that has helped me in the past is to work with my team to come up with ideas for the vision statement. Write down everything that matters to your product/products and then distill the ideas that really matter. It also helps to tie it back to your product and organizational goals to ensure its relevant and the right vision for your product.

I like to think of the vision to be at least a 5 year plan.

Ideally the vision statement never changes. Practically, it makes sense to revisit when you: (1) are close to achieving your original vision, (2) when there are significant events that impact your product direction. Its likely something that happens every few (4-5+) years not every year.

I wouldn't think so. Your vision isn't something that's measurable or track-able in the near time, and hence user testing is hard. Its more likely to want to validate the market feasibility for your vision statement.

I typically don't track metrics against the product vision. The vision is used to frame my product goals and those have metrics. It is important that your metrics are tracked against SMART goals, and its rare you can do that with a vision. For example, your vision statement isn't going to say, growing my customers by 10x and hence you don't track customers against the vision statement. Your vision is likely something like, make my product the best place to accomplish a task. If so, you might have a goal around usability, accessibility, etc of the said task and goals to track success of these goals.

It can take anywhere from a few goals to multiple weeks. In addition to the thought that goes into it, its important to align stakeholders to your vision and this can add time to this task.