In what tangible ways should your product vision dictate the day to day decisions your product development team makes?

Question

Bhaskar Krishnan · Accepted Answer

* Product Vision is similar to a compass for explorers! Product Vision sets the North Star for the product teams and ensures that the Product Principles, Values & Strategy aligns with the Vision on a daily basis
 * Its easy for Product teams to devolve into a mess of features or play catch-up to competitors, etc without a singular vision thats bigger than the team's daily activities. Sony Ericcson, Nokia & Blackberry (smartphones), Bolt (electic cars) or Yahoo (Consumer & AdTech) are examples of firms that lost sight of their vision

Samantha Ugulava · Answer

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 our job to make sure our teams stay focused on the problems we are trying to solve. I've found that referencing our produt vision is a helpful tool when I've needed to refocus my team when we get off track or need to make a tough decision.

I recently led a project where we tried to help users feel confident that their work was automatically saved in Confluence. We had found that creators often used "publish" to save their work, so we set out to give users a dynamic, visual confirmation that work was being saved automatically. As a team, we had to make some tough tradeoffs between user experience and performance. I often reminded our team that our goal was to increase confidence while users created content in Confluence, and all of our decisions needed to help push that vision forward. It helped create a common language for the team as we weighed different options.

Related Ask Me Anything Sessions

GitLab Director of Product Management, Jacqueline Porter on Product Vision

Atlassian Product Leader, Enterprise Agility, Samantha Ugulavaon Product Vision

Meta (Facebook) Product Leadership, Bhaskar Krishnanon Product Vision

Related Questions