The Product Vision Sprint
Design a Strong Product Vision in five days.
A strong product vision enables you to build a product that customer's love.
But how do you craft one?
If you are a founder or a product manager and are having difficulty prioritizing all the great ideas you have, crafting a strong product vision will make it much clearer which ideas you need to follow up on and build. It also makes it much easier to get the rest of your team on board with your ideas.
It can feel overwhelming to craft a world-class product vision. Where do you start? How do you craft it so that it is compelling?
The Product Vision Sprint
The Product Vision Sprint will help you craft your product vision storyboard, the heart of a strong product vision in an easy, fun, way. The Sprint combines:
A Design Sprint
with its rapid iterations and group collaboration techniques to bring out the creativity in teams.
Product Management
to understand exactly what your team needs this Product Vision to do to align and motivate your team to deliver better products.
Storytelling skills
to engineer a bold story that pivots around and exposes the value of what your product will do for your customer.
“If you can fit it on a canvas, I don’t think it’s a product vision...I cannot see how you could capture the dynamics that are necessary on a two dimensional canvas.”
Marty Cagan
Sicilian Valley Product Group
What does a Product Vision Sprint week look like?
The Product Vision Sprint week is an intense week. And it is also fun and is a part of building a great team. Teams tends to leave the week not only with a strong product vision but also inspired, motivated, and with a greater appreciation for their colleagues.
We recommend no more than 10 people in the room for the week - a cross-functional group of people who have insights into the product, the customer, and the technology. And the leadership of the company.
What is the end result?
The vision storyboard: A strategic visual narrative that is based on the customer experience you are driving towards in the form of of a memorable narrative.
The vision storyboard is the tool to create a strong product vision as it is:
Visual: Visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text.
A Story: We are natural storytelling creatures. We remember stories.
Visionary: You need a bold vision of where your product will be 3-10 years out to inspire.
Walt Disney pioneered the use of storyboarding to make the film "Snow White." Released in 1937, it was the world’s first feature film animation. It was a big risky bet for the company and the team was overwhelmed. Disney pioneered a new process in this movie with storyboards, a comic-book-like outline of the story. This enabled the team to understand the vision as they took on the new format. And the results were fantastic: In its first year, Snow White grossed $8 million -- more than any other film before it. And it was all created on storyboards.
AirBnB borrowed this tactic in 2011 to boost the next phase of their growth. And since then, product teams have been using storyboards to grow their business.
For more examples of product visions here.
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Author of Le Petit Prince
French writer, poet, journalist and pioneering aviator.
1900-1944
Having a strong Product Vision makes you a better company
Lets you make better products
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Lets you make better products
A strong Product Vision provides the Product Trio (design, engineering and product managers) healthy constraints around how to define value from a customer and business perspective.
Scale without too much Process
Scale Without Too Much Process
It’s easier to scale with people rather than with process. When there is a strong product vision, people are more likely to be on the same page - they can understand what you are trying to do and why. As a result, you can give people more freedom and still move in the same direction.
Motivates & Inspires
Motivates & Inspires
A strong Product Vision inspires your team, stakeholders, investors, and customers. We want to work with 'missionaries not mercenaries' (because when the going gets tough, the mercenaries are out while the missionaries double down).
Drives Strategy
Drives Strategy
The Product Strategy is a plan to achieve the Vision and will also include things like short-term business impacts. As the guiding light, it is also benchmark against which you can evaluate your strategy - ask yourself, “Are we getting closer or further away from our Product Vision?”
Builds Your Own Leadership
Builds Your Own Leadership
A strong vision is a starting point for leadership as leadership is about taking people somewhere. A strong Product Vision helps leaders avoid the trap of self-aggrandizement. The leader becomes a servant of an important vision, not an important leader who needs to be served.
Aligns People
Aligns People
A strong Product Vision becomes an invisible guide helping people make every day decisions. Without it, your team is either asking you about every little thing or making decisions in a vacuum. With one, decisions can be made in a way that supports a future product state, long before any tickets are on their board.
Connects Engineering
Connects Engineering
A strong Product vision will connect with engineering by sharing the larger picture/vision, sparking ideas and providing them enough clarity about what’s coming so that can ensure they have an architecture in place that can serve the needs.
Helps Recruit
A strong Product Vision serves as one of our most powerful recruiting tools. As Marty Cagan says in his book Inspired, "When done well, the product vision is one of our most effective recruiting tools, and it serves to motivate the people on your teams to come to work every day. Strong technology people are drawn to an inspiring vision.”
Helps Recruit
Easier Prioritization
Easier time prioritizing
Many people struggling to choose between two great ideas don't think that the root cause of this inability to choose is a weak product vision. But having a strong product vision provides a rubric. Without that core understanding of your destination, it is hard to make these short-term trade-offs.
Higher Output Velocity
Higher Output Velocity
Are you spending a lot of time in meetings talking about plans that never materialize? Does your team throw away months of work? Changing direction results in a lot of lost time and work. To the point that you can’t accomplish any major goals. Where urgency supersedes importance and problems become crises that require heroic efforts to solve, maybe it is time to think about a stronger product vision.
“To the person who does not know where he wants to go there is no favorable wind.” – Seneca
Janet's Product Vision Sprint was a game-changer for my company. In just one week of training, our team gained a deeper understanding of our product vision and direction. Janet's approach was hands-on, practical, and tailored to our specific needs. Thanks to her expertise, our team is more aligned and motivated than ever before. Highly recommended!
Menno Gravemaker, Founder and CEO, Momo Medical
Some other great resources on Product Vision:
Marty Cagan: Product Vision FAQ
Ken Blanchard: Full Steam Ahead!: Unleash the Power of Vision in Your Work and Your Life.
Miguel Carruego: Symptoms of a broken product culture — Part 1