How to set vision and strategy

Enrolling your team in an inspiring picture of the future will help you get the best from their diverse expertise, and enable you to move faster, together.

We talk a lot about Vision, and Strategy—especially strategy, but I often wonder whether product leaders take the time to pull back and examine why. What is the role of a vision? And how does it relate to the mission of the organization? Why do products and teams need vision and strategy—is it just a waste of time when you’re trying to get things done? Most importantly, doing it right, is it really that hard?

It’s really not. So for this week’s newsletter I’m going to briefly run through how to make vision and strategy clear without too much fuss.

At the core of every product is a relationship between the customers who use it, and the people who build it, and creating ever better alignment between the two, is the role of the Product Leader. It starts with the people who build it—the designers, engineers, product managers, marketers and creators—the team who do the work every day.

When it comes to building teams, I’m a big believer in what I call ‘RAELs’:

• Recruit powerful diverse teams

• Agree why you’re working together and what you expect from them

• Ensure they have what they need to thrive (inclusion!)

• Let them have all the autonomy they need to be great

I assume by now this is obvious to everyone—but in order for this method to really work, you have to create the right context for people to come to work and be successful, every day. And right now, when so many of us are working remotely, and are facing the challenges of such porous work-lives, the role of Vision, and Strategy is more important than ever.

What is a Vision?

Many great product leaders I know talk about Product Management as the work of storytelling. It’s true, change management experts talk about the role of a Vision as the galvanizing, imaginative piece of the story that encourages everyone to look ahead, say 2-5 years, to consider what might be possible if everybody works together. In fact it’s grounded in behavioral psychology—if you want to encourage groups of people to shift behavior, they need to align on, and be enrolled in a common future.

If you can paint a compelling vision for your organization, and most importantly, your team, the daily work, recruitment, and enrolling people outside the product function becomes much easier. The job here is to inspire everybody to take action to build the Vision. Here are some questions that help me frame a product vision:

• What is a bold, ambitious future we’re trying to create with this product?

• What is the impact we’re trying to have in the world?

• Is it far enough out of reach to be really ambitious?

• Is it achievable, with enough energy?

Ideally, your product vision is a powerful, compelling statement that inspires everybody who works on your product, and creates crystal-cut clarity for where you are going.

What is a product strategy?

A great strategy articulates how you will build the vision you’ve laid out. This can be:

• The major projects you intend to take on (and won’t)

• The geographies you’ll work in (and won’t)

• How you will continue to differentiate (and things you will accept as standard)

• The types of customers or market you’ll pursue (and won’t)

• The types of activities you’ll pursue (and yep… the ones you won’t)

Those are some of the bounding boxes you might use to help frame strategy—but I’m sure there are others.

Some people talk about product strategy as a series of ‘product-market fits’, I see the wisdom in that, but it can be reductive, especially when technology moves so fast—and as I’ve said before, it’s important to be able to see when to cultivate moments of explosive creativity and moments of optimization when you’re executing.

At its essence, a great strategy helps everyone in the organization see how they should deploy the, let’s say ten, units of energy they have each day in service of the vision. It doesn’t foist upon them the methods of work, or necessarily set the goals, but it clarifies the route you will take in broad brush strokes.

Articulating strategy can be tricky, people often wonder what the right level of detail is. For me the answer is the minimum possible to make it abundantly clear how you will achieve your vision. This might be as little as a few sentences, or it might be a series of slides or a memo.

I think of vision as the destination and strategy as the car, with cashflow as the gas you’ll put in the tank to get there. Your team may choose to take different routes, or steer the car and push the accelerator (and the brakes!) in a multitude of ways, but this clarity gives everybody an understanding of the journey you’re on together.

I’ve also heard of people using ‘Strategy’ and ‘Roadmap’ interchangeably. I think this is where many come unstuck. A roadmap is often a prescriptive ‘journey map’ (to overextend the analogy, it’s sort of like the route in your GPS). The trouble is, that is really more of a plan. Creating over-prescriptive plans for your team negates the value in the ‘RAELs’ method above, and you end up with underutilized expertise who can get frustrated, rather than operate with autonomy. It’s often said that if you pay people and plan together they’ll work in service of the money, but if you inspire them and offer guidance, they’ll work in service of a vision.

Regardless, I tend to create a roadmap once there is a strategy in place, it creates sequencing and more rigidity—ideally it’s a collaborative, ever changing artifact that considers the month-to-month (or in early stage startups, week-to-week) view of how to put the strategy in action.

Ultimately, vision and strategy need not be complex, drawn out processes—they are tools to help you move at pace and delegate responsibility, to not have to sweat every little decision, to help you step away from the backlog and think about how you nurture a team to be successful as a diverse group of humans, working together collaboratively across your organization. As Jeff Bezos once said “Be stubborn on vision, flexible on the details”.

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In the spirit of learning I love to read comments, builds and things that will make these more useful—and would love to hear from you, feel free to drop comments below, or get in touch. Unlike other crap DJs I also take requests for what to spin next.