From Chaos to Clarity: Setting a Clear Vision for Your Product Teams
An explanation and practical steps for how to create clarity and focus for your teams through a strong product vision
This is a second in a series of articles based on the combined experiences of Product Managers and Strategists working in a variety of companies—designed to help product leaders take the first steps towards a product-led model in their organisation.
If you’re joining us after our first article, welcome back! Or if you haven’t had a chance to catch up yet, be sure to check out our post on assessing your organisation for common challenges and anti-patterns that might be holding you back from embracing product transformation. Mapping out your workflows, identifying bottlenecks, and understanding the challenges you face are crucial first steps in any product org transformation. But once you’ve done that, what comes next?Â
In this article, we’ll be building on your assessment, explaining how you can use your learnings to set a clear vision, strategy, and focus for your product teams. These elements are foundational; they ensure that all efforts are aligned and that your teams are working towards a common goal. Without them, even the best-laid plans can fall into disarray.
Why Start With the Vision?
Once you’ve assessed your organisation to clarify your performance in five key areas (Vision, People, Process, Tech, and Data), you can begin your transformation in the worst performing area first. Too often, organizations spread themselves too thin by trying to tackle too many issues at once or by focusing on symptoms rather than root causes. This leads to misaligned priorities, wasted resources, and ultimately, a failure to deliver value to customers.
In case you haven’t already, start your assessment here!:
These issues are likely interconnected, but you need to find the one problem that, if solved, would have the most significant impact on your organization’s ability to deliver value. In our experience Vision is often the crux. If there are multiple poorly performing areas then a clear vision can lay great foundations for improvements across other areas (particularly People)!
Why is a Product Vision So Important?
The vision is the reason for creating the product. All too often, organisations misunderstand the power of a compelling vision. You’ll struggle to rally your teams around a financial goal or KPI, you need an idealistic picture of the future that gives meaning to your work.Â
In our experience, teams with vision have stronger retention—which can be a crucial starting point for turning around a team. If you don't, then the loss of people and associated pressures on delivery can leave no space to focus on what matters.
Strategy and execution will evolve, but your vision will stay. Ensuring you’re all rowing in the same direction, avoiding the distraction of good ideas that don’t align and embracing the ones that do!
What Makes an Effective Product Vision?
To make your vision truly visionary, consider these four elements:
Is it ambitious? It pushes the boundaries of what's achievable and defies the status quo. A vision goes beyond just a slogan; it's a catalyst for transformation and mindset.
Is it inspiring? It should ignite our drive and fuel our determination, sparking purpose and focus. It needs to ignite the team’s passion for creating a product that has the power to transform lives.
Is it clear? In just a sentence or two, your vision should paint an entire picture. If it can be seen, it can be understood—easy for your team to circle back to during decision making.
Is it enduring? Markets, teams, and strategies can change, but a vision that withstands the test of time should guide your organisation for years to come.
Take Airbnb as an example, their vision is to "Create a world where anyone can belong anywhere". It goes beyond the initial offering of just booking accommodations to focus on belonging—creating something emotionally resonant and inclusive.
Bringing Your Vision to Life with a Strategy
The strategy is how your vision will be achieved. It’s the bridge between where you are now and where you want to be. A good strategy is not just a plan, a goal, or a set of actions. It’s a cohesive, consistent series of choices that reinforce each other to support the foundations listed above. Before you begin to build this, make sure you’ve got clear foundations—it’ll help you with your vision too!:
Who is the product for? → Market and target customers
Why would people buy and use it? → User needs and the problem you’re solving
What is the product? What makes it stand out? → Key features and differentiators
What are the business goals? How does it pay? → Business goals
Setting a North Star
So how do you know your strategy is working? You’ll need metrics and KPIs to measure your success, or else it’s just guesswork! A good place to start is with a North Star metric—this is a single metric that best captures the core value that your product delivers and should go hand-in-hand with your vision. To define this:
Understand Your Core Value Proposition: What is the most significant value your product provides to customers?
Identify the Metric That Reflects This Value: Look for a metric that directly correlates with delivering this value. For example, if you’re a streaming service, your North Star Metric might be the total time users spend watching content.
Align the Metric with Long-Term Growth: Ensure that the metric you choose also aligns with your company’s growth objectives.
Setting OKRs with a Lean Value Tree
The Lean Value Tree is another excellent tool for breaking down your vision into actionable steps. It helps visualise the path from your vision from the specific initiatives that will help you achieve it.
To define this:
Start with your vision at the top of the tree
Branch out into your key objectives—broad goals created from business drivers that support the vision. Preferably these are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (that is to say, no overlap and covering all the bases).Â
Define key results or KPIs for each objective—these should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) and indicate progress towards your objectives. Without these, you’re just guessing if your product is working.
List your initiatives—the specific projects or tasks you’ll do to achieve the key results.
You’ll want to give yourself a decent amount of time to work towards these objectives (~3 months or a quarter), before you reassess and set new targets. This can mean a lot of (educated) guess work early on! Across the many organisations we have worked with, we’ve pulled together these top tips for setting good objectives and key results:
Take a balanced view to metrics: Customer indicators, financial indicators, and team happiness indicators
Don’t measure everything that can be measured. For example, avoid vanity metrics (views, shares, downloads) in favour of things like referral rates or daily active usage which better reflect your growth and retention
Be selective and focused with your initiatives, choosing a small number of metrics that truly help you understand how your product performs (e.g. think about leading vs lagging metrics), to ensure all efforts are aligned with your vision and strategy to stop your teams getting pulled in too many directions
Review them regularly and adjust if necessary—things can change frequently (performance, competition, trends, etc.)
If you’re in an early stage company, or keen to innovate, try swapping out a key result for a hypothesis (or bet) that you’d like to validate!
Get Buy-in From Your Teams
Once you have a clear vision, strategy, and focus, you’ll want to get buy-in from your teams! Is this something they believe in? Do they think it’s realistic if ambitious? Share your thoughts with them and adjust the strategy accordingly to make sure you’re all on board and ready to tackle the next quarter.
Without a clear vision and strategy, it’s hard for your teams to identify opportunities and prioritise the most valuable activities to drive the business forward. So you’ll want to ensure alignment and familiarity with those involved. Everyone should understand the direction and their role in achieving the goals.
Regular, effective communication is key to this. In the past, we’ve found the following interventions work well:
Product Briefs: Create a resource that outlines the vision, strategy, and current focus areas and make it easily accessible. When creating other product documentation (such as a PRD), be sure to link it back to the vision so the team understands how it all fits together.
Regular Town Halls: Use these to update everyone on progress towards the vision and celebrate successes—team members should feel a part of something, understanding how their contribution has moved the needle.
Visual Aids: Use posters, dashboards, or other visual tools to keep the vision and strategy top of mind.
Next Steps
With a clear vision, strategy, and focus in place, the next step is to organise your teams in a way that best supports these goals. In the next article, we’ll continue this journey by exploring how to set up product-based squads—product teams organised in a way that supports your vision and strategy, who are empowered to drive the most critical initiatives forward. Stay tuned!
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