#124 The Vision-Based Product Strategy
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In today's episode, titled "The Vision-Based Product Strategy," our hosts Alex and Christian tackle the challenges and importance of having a clear product vision. They discuss the common pitfalls of defining a vision and how it can lead to misalignment within the company. Christian challenges the traditional approach of creating a single inspiring sentence and emphasizes the significance of also including the "what" and the "why" in the product vision. The conversation evolves into distinguishing between a company's mission and its vision, and how these two aspects need to be aligned to drive success. Get ready for an insightful discussion filled with practical advice on crafting a strong product vision.
Topics Discussed
(00:02:34) Defining an inspiring, world-changing vision.
(00:04:18) Product vision = future state and covers the what and why
(00:07:53) The mission in concise sentences.
(00:10:30) Vision and missions in multiproduct companies
(00:14:59) Alignment with input from teams.
Meeting Notes (transcription)
Christian:
So seems like you have the most favorite podcast guest of the product bakery here today.
Alex:
Well, he's the most favorite host.
Christian:
You're right, you're right. So for the people who are not watching the YouTube video, you can see now here in the background, alex dog.
Alex:
He just left. Yeah, here's enough of that. How are you doing, Chris? Question?
Christian:
Yeah, very well. How about you?
Alex:
Can't complain. Had a red eye, flight in the morning, 15 hours of working, and here we are.
Christian:
Wow.
Alex:
Yes. But that's the beauty of life. That's what fires me up.
Christian:
Yeah, I know. This is how I got to know you, actually. The work mode.
Alex:
Exactly. So excuse my tired face, but even more, we're full of hot topics and probably one of the things that we should pick up again is everything around product visions. And I'm saying that because obviously part of my day to day was defining a product strategy or working on a product strategy. And I know you always have some very spicy opinions when it comes to product visions.
Christian:
So then let me ask you, what's your key challenge at the moment with your product vision?
Alex:
Alignment.
Christian:
Oh, yeah. Well, do you have a product vision?
Alex:
Actually? Well, I would say we jumped relatively quickly to the product strategy because we do collectively, at least in the product organization, have a shared understanding of the vision and where we want to go. But yeah, we don't have a properly defined, not even company vision. Right. I mean, I think everyone knows what the vision is or where the company started, but when it comes to having it really written down so that everyone buys into it, that's probably still missing. We have it on the brand level.
Christian:
So you're saying everyone in the company has a clear understanding of the vision, but you're struggling with alignment.
Alex:
There is different interpretations of the vision.
Christian:
And this is actually a good point to start into the topic today because this is recently one of my main critique points when it comes to product vision and strategy definition. Because what many companies do is they sit down in an offsite for a couple of days, completely distracted from everything and sorry, separated from everything and not getting distracted. Actually focused. Focused. Isolated. That was the word I was looking for. So completely isolated. Ideally or not ideally, they hire like an agency that costs a couple of hundreds, thousands of euros or dollars, and then they define this one inspiring sentence that is going to solve world hunger, cancer, everything.
Right. So the problem is then what happens next?
Alex:
Yeah. And that's the thing, right? Yes. We all have this one sentence. We also have this one sentence, but it means different things to different people. Right. So that was also like why I said we jumped to the product strategy because that helped us break it down. Have different building blocks in place on where we want to go over the next couple of years.
Christian:
Yeah, and I understand that, but I also like to challenge that process because what about you take these strategic elements and key points and put that into the vision.
Alex:
Let's talk about the definition of the vision. Right. Because you spend a lot of time thinking about absolutely.
Christian:
I mean, the product vision describes the future state of the product. This is like a very common definition. And I think something that needs to be added is that on top of this sentence, you need to add a second sentence to it. So the product vision describes the future state of the product, but also it describes the what and the why. And when I talk about the what so let's say, I don't know, we back then worked for a company that was doing card readers, right? And we had this great vision of we believe in the world where small businesses can successful doing what they love. Sounds like an awesome statement, but honestly and now coming back to what you said, what does that mean for me? It means something completely different than you. So that means we are not aligned on the vision.
We don't even know what the vision means. We don't even know what the vision is.
Alex:
Thank you, Nemo.
Christian:
Yes, he's agreeing with me.
Alex:
No, the thing is, I like to have that sentence. I like to have that sentence because it at least allows for everyone to stand behind that. Right. Even if you have a different understanding of it.
Christian:
But behind what are they standing if nobody understands?
Alex:
No, but that's where then the next building blocks come in where we can talk about the what and where we can talk about the why. Right. But at the base, believing in what the company is trying to do. Right. Helping the small merchants to get better at what they do right. Independently of what we do to achieve that and why we're doing it, generally, like finding people that say, okay, yes, actually I want to help those small merchants get successful. Right. So as like, this very first step of this is what I can stand behind.
And in our case, for example, when we're talking about the investments we offer, what we always say is like democratizing private equity. Right? Which, I mean, it's three words pretty much, but I think it's still something that where people say, okay, yes, making private equity more accessible for a wider group of people, independently of how we do it and why we're doing it and so on. At least that's like something where already it can be a deal breaker for some people. I might not stand behind it. We have clients that don't stand behind that because they are like, oh, no, I actually am happy that it's not so accessible for everyone. Right. So I think as a core thing, having that sentence and nailing that sentence can help.
Christian:
I disagree I disagree. So let's say it like this before I disagree, then we need to distinguish between the vision and the mission.
Alex:
Yeah.
Christian:
So what's the company's mission? So I think this is a complete different topic, which is, by the way, related to the vision, because in my opinion, the mission very nicely answers what we are doing.
Alex:
Right? That's the vision.
Christian:
Yeah. So it depends.
Alex:
The point is, you know how bad I am with semantics, right?
Christian:
Yeah. And here's the thing.
Alex:
You can put a word behind it. It just needs to serve a purpose.
Christian:
Exactly. So and I think let's maybe start with the mission. So what is the mission? And yeah, one sentence can be helpful. I'm more of a fan of having like, between three and five sentence because then these sentences because then you can make it a bit more specific. So, again, like, free words can be very on point, it can be very clear, but it can also help to just go a couple of levels deeper and to explain people, hey, we believe that decentralized finances will serve the world with a better financial system. Our mission as a company is to provide XYZ, right? So this gives context. So a little bit of context and the why is to me a good starting point. And this is, in my opinion, the product or the company mission.
Christian:
And with that being said, I say, okay, good. If we have that as a foundation, we can move on and talk about the vision, but to talk about how to not do things. So this is something that many people skip, right? So they neither have a clear vision nor they have a mission, and they then jump to strategic discussions. But here's the thing. If I believe that our mission as a company is to if you go back to the product vision that I just quoted, my mission is to serve card payments. The other one says, my mission is to have an accounting system for our small merchants. Then we are not aligned.
Alex:
Right.
Christian:
And we are not aware of what our core is that we're doing, even if you're a multiproduct company. So, therefore, I think this needs a little bit of work and discussions to figure out the mission.
Alex:
And this is something that I've seen happening quite often, especially across different teams, right? Like, you often have teams in the company that if they solely look at their interest, it might not be aligned with the goal and the focus of other teams. Right. Classic example, right? You have companies that serve both direct consumers and business partners or enterprise clients, right? So depending on where you sit in the organization, maybe you believe that those enterprise clients are the way to reach that vision mission. If you're on the other side, you think like, only about your direct consumers and that's then where across the company you start having a disconnect. Right? Because how do you then prioritize if you don't understand how each different piece of puzzle ties into the other one.
Christian:
Yeah, and it gets definitely harder for multiproduct companies. So this is why in a multiproduct company every product needs to have its own product mission vision and then on top of that, as an umbrella, you have the company mission and the company vision. That is important. And this is also what I just want to share to you and to the audience that you need to take a step back before you jump to strategic discussions and understand what and why you're doing things. And ideally you can frame this with some context in the product mission and then I would take the next step and start thinking about the product vision. But I am moving away from the classic product vision definition by defining a sentence that includes the persona and something and maybe a time frame or something like this. So I think it needs much more deep work because just having a sentence that is not clear forces you automatically to go into the strategic part to make things more clear, right? Yeah, but what if you put the strategic elements you can agree on into the vision by saying by 2025, by 2026 we are market leader by serving our customers with the fastest sign up and so on and so on and so on. So writing an extended version of the vision like one or two or even three pages and explain people exactly where you want to be.
Christian:
And then taking this vision first of all as a tool to align within the company and sharing this with every employee and saying hey, read it. Sharing this to people who apply for your company and say hey, read this product vision from us and see if you're a match or do also what you just mentioned, share it with your clients and maybe your clients will say no, this is not what I want, I don't believe in the vision. Good, then you're not the right client for us. And having this as a foundation allows you to break it down further into strategic themes. So instead of creating this business plan like strategies that you're usually anyway not matching because as we all know, roadmaps are outdated and plans are gone the moment you create them. Rather working with themes like in kind of something similar to an OKR framework.
Alex:
And having like a guidance it sounds like objectives.
Christian:
Exactly. Having bigger objectives, strategic objectives, let's call them like this I like to call them strategic themes but it's a good inspiration for a different wording. But this is maybe a better way to approach the whole where do we want to be in the future topic rather than just sitting down and okay, we don't have a mission, we don't have a vision, we all know what we want to do, right? But we are not able to align. So let's jump to the strategic discussion.
Alex:
But it's actually interesting. Right. And it comes back to my general objection. Or I can't work with semantics on what each thing needs to be because I think the lines are blurry and you need to make what works for your company. I think we touched on that multiple times. I think what we currently worked on or what we prepared is more is an even more extended version of this vision, more towards a direction of like, white paper ish documentation nice where we go in detail over the different building blocks. It's not a roadmap, it's not exactly what we want to build. It's why we focus on these things, why we think it's important.
Partially also, it still says where there is ambiguity and where we still need to uncover. If then it's the final direction. Which gives us a little bit like also the understanding that we need to be agile company that can pivot in different directions according to the learnings and the findings throughout the process. So that's the document. In our case, one of the important things is also we're really setting this up from a product perspective and we're trying to navigate the company also from a product perspective. Right. So product is in charge of defining this for the whole organization. That's the card that we got from our CEO and from the rest of the C suite.
So we're aligned within the R and D organization. We're now having a final alignment, like with the senior leadership. It was taking into consideration the input from the different teams, also the business cases and the financials behind it. Right. Because it's also important as a company to look where does the money sit, where should we invest? And look at the success in the past. And now the next couple of weeks are really the rollout plan and that's where then the alignment comes in. Right? Because, yes, we do have some misalignment when it comes to priorities according to the different teams, but by following also a bit of a top down approach, not in the creation, but in the distribution of like, okay, this is the final vision that we are following. We can now bring it to the rest of the organization and restructure also the organization around it.
Christian:
Yeah. I think it's important to just remember everyone, that whether it's the mission vision or strategy creation, it's an Iterative process. So you take feedback from people, you work it out, you go back, you roll it out. That takes time. And during each of those processes, you will always get some feedback and ideally some ideas to improve if necessary.
Alex:
And resilience is always important. Right. We saw it over the last years. The economy can change totally. You might have a pandemic that changes how people interact with the word. It's like you never know. And that can lead to also a company having to completely change also the vision and the strategy and the direction.
Christian:
Yeah, fully agree. So, yeah, alex, I have written a very extended article about how to not and how to define a product's, mission, vision and strategy. So I'm going to link it for everyone who is interested. Feel free to take a look at this. I think it's a 20 minutes read. It's quite long, but it's worth it.
Alex:
I mean, we're still slightly under 20 minutes, so let's keep it efficient and wish everyone a great night.
