How to Create a Truly Inspiring Product Vision

Speaker A: Foreign. Product Management Podcast if you're working on something exciting that you really care about, you don't have to be pushed. The vision pulls you. Steve Jobs once said, creating such a forward momentum is a key benefit that a product vision should offer. Unfortunately, I've seen many visions over the years that failed to move people. So how can you create a, uh, truly inspirational vision that motivates and engages people? That's what I'll explain in this episode. However, before I dive into the details, let me briefly describe what a vision is and why you should use one. A product vision describes the ultimate reason for building the product and the positive change it should bring about. It's best captured as a B hack. A big hairy, Audacious goal An example of a vision for an app that helps people reduce the risk of developing type 2 diabetes might help people eat healthily or even shorter healthy eating. As this example shows, a vision is best expressed as a concise statement or a slogan. I generally encourage teams to use a product vision. Why? An effective vision inspires people. It creates a meaningful purpose and shows them how they work, connects, uh, to the bigger picture, how it helps make a positive impact and this motivates the individuals and encourages them to move forward together. Additionally, a big inspirational vision acts as the product's North Star. It provides continued guidance for the product team no matter how much the product market grows and its UX features and technologies, uh, change. But when I reflect on the visions I've seen in my coaching work and my workshops, they often state what the product should look like and what it should do and what business goals it should achieve. While there is per se nothing wrong with such a vision, it is not particularly inspiring. If implementing features and chasing business benefits is all we do, it's hard to stay motivated, especially when the going gets tough. For example, when the development progress is unexpectedly slowed down or the market response to the latest release is less positive than we anticipated. To craft a truly inspiring vision, you really need to state the product's ultimate purpose and to discover it. Ask why the product exists? What positive change will it have achieved in five to 10 years? What impact will the product have on the world and especially on the people who come in touch with it? How will it have changed their lives for the better? Such a purpose driven vision generates strong motivation for everyone working on the product. It gives their work meaning and helps people understand how their work makes a positive impact. Now let's make this more concrete and listen to the following sample vision Build an AI coding assistance with autonomous agent Capabilities and automatic testing and debugging. This vision statement seems to be well thought out. It envisions the new product, but therein lies the problem. In my mind. It's a solution focused vision, not a purpose driven one. I would therefore rework it and use the following phrase instead. Empower people to create software at the speed of thought. This vision resonates much more with me. It gives me a purpose to enable people to create and that motivates me. And additionally, it does not talk about the target group and features. And this has two benefits. First, it makes the vision more stable. A uh, product's market and features and business goals, they will change, but the vision, the vision should stay stable and provide continued guidance across the entire product life cycle. The second benefit is that it makes the vision more concise and easier to remember. And that's a good thing, as you want the vision not to be forgotten, but to be present in people's minds. Now, while choosing a purpose driven vision is great, it's not quite enough to be truly inspiring. A vision has to move people and to achieve this, it really has to resonate with them. It must speak to them and evoke positive emotions such as feeling, happy, joyous, energized and excited. Emotions drive actions. Logic alone does not move people. The lack of emotional load is a major source of vision failure. In my experience, many product visions I've seen over the years were written in formal and at, uh, times rather technical language. And as a consequence, they did not create a positive emotional reaction and failed to move people. There is no emotion without emotion. Therefore, choose your words to describe the vision very carefully. Use positive language that focuses on possibilities, has a caring tone, touches people, ignites the imagination, and makes them at least mildly excited about working on the product. Take the following vision for provide personalized education that adapts to every learner's goals and pace. This vision nicely captures a purpose providing personalized education. But I find it rather dry and boring. It really fails to move me. To make it more exciting, we can reframe it. Make learning fun. The word fun triggers a strong positive emotional reaction in me. The whole phrase resonates with me and I can really imagine myself working on a product that makes knowledge acquisition enjoyable. If using emotional language feels hard at first for you, then don't worry. Simply experiment with different words. Check if they move you, what impact they have on you, and try out alternative formulations. And so it's important to understand that, uh, creating an inspiring vision isn't a five minute job and that you Take the necessary time to get it as right as you can. And don't expect your initial attempt to be perfect. Um, instead, draft a first vision and then edit and improve it. Revising text is not something that's bad, but that's something that is a necessary part of the creative process. It's something that even the very best writers routinely do. Now, to maximize the chances of creating a vision that resonates strongly with people, I recommend following a collaborative approach and co creating the vision. My preferred way to do this is to invite the right people. Development team representatives like a designer, a tech lead and a tester, and key stakeholders such as a marketeer, uh, sales rep, customer support team member to attend a collaborative workshop. A great way to get started is using structured brainstorming. Ask people to describe the positive change the product should bring about on cars. And then, once everyone's finished, invite them to read out their visions and then build a shared understanding. And use that to develop a vision that captures the product's real purpose and speaks to people. Your aim should be to reach unanimous agreement on the vision. And that means that everyone involved in making the product a success in building, marketing, selling and supporting it, that everyone wholeheartedly supports the vision. To put it differently, the vision must sound and feel right for everyone. And you might want to invite a skilled facilitator, this might be a team coach or scrum master, to moderate the workshop and help the group come up with a vision everyone can support. This allows you, as the person in charge of the product, to focus on getting the vision right, rather than, well, having to facilitate and making sure everyone's ideas are heard and nobody dominates. To conclude this episode, let me say a few words about using AI in the process of creating a vision. My recommendation is to always come up with the initial vision yourself and then ask your favorite AI to revise and improve it, assuming you want to enlist its help. If you approach it the other way around and ask the AI to create the initial vision, you expect too much. AI tools cannot understand human emotions and they do not know what resonates with the people involved in building your product. They can't read the room. That's something that you have to do. And so if you rely on an AI tool too much, you're unlikely to end up with a truly inspiring vision. I hope you found my advice helpful. You can learn more about creating an inspiring vision by attending my workshops and reading or listening to my book Strategize. Uh, thank you for listening.