Introducing: The Visionary

At times, a Product Owner should take the stance of being the Visionary. In Part II, “The Customer Representative,” you learned more about how to take the stance of the Customer Representative, helping you get a solid understanding of your customers, their needs, and the product. After learning more about your product, your customers, and their needs, you may have gotten inspired, and you may have generated new ideas for your product. Representing those ideas, that vision about the product, and the goals to be achieved, is what the Visionary stance is about. Many Product Owners suffer from the reverse Spider-Man syndrome, meaning they have little formal power, but a great responsibility for the product, nonetheless. The result of not having that formal power is that you will need to create followers. These followers are people who are motivated to join the cause—your cause. Or in other words, they aren’t following you just because of the person you are. Instead, they follow you because they are passionate about the vision, purpose, or goals you seek to achieve. But how do you create followers without formal power? How do you inspire people to follow your lead? Those and many others are exactly the questions to cover in this part: the Visionary.

A vision, mission, or purpose can be considered the North Star for your product. It explains where you are heading. When taking the Visionary stance as a Product Owner, you focus on the future. You look forward and imagine where you, your product, and the company are heading. Taking this stance is all about challenging the status quo. So, forget about those bugs for a moment. Forget about the technical debt in your product. Forget about the latest complaint by that very important customer. When you are in the Visionary stance, you don’t focus on the now, you focus on what could be in the future.

Being future-focused (not all the time, but at least regularly) is important to avoid a catastrophe before it happens. Being future-focused helps you to plan for increases in staffing, production, customer demand, and rising and new target audiences, for example. Having and communicating a clear vision to the people around you will help to prepare for what might happen in the future. Having a clear vision keeps a Product Owner on course during hard times or when experiencing unexpected setbacks.

Communicating a clear vision helps you to build a unified force amongst your team(s) and stakeholders, and it also has a positive impact on your organization’s effectiveness. Having an inspiring, ambitious, and clear vision inspires action. It ignites a spark, passion, and motivation. A strong vision pulls in ideas, people, and other resources to achieve it. When people understand and buy in to the vision, it brings them together. It creates the energy and willingness to make change happen. It inspires individuals and organizations to commit, persist, and give their best. It focuses and aligns efforts, so everyone is working towards the same understood direction.

A clear vision also acts as a guide for employee actions and decision making. It functions as a practical guide for creating plans, setting goals and objectives, and coordinating and evaluating the work on any initiative, whether it is small or large. For example, if there is a decision to be made about undertaking a new initiative, or if a decision is needed on how to complete a task, stop and ask yourself, “Is what I am doing—or what I am about to do—consistent with the vision?” If it is, that’s great, go ahead and move forward! If not, or if there is any doubt that the idea aligns with the vision, now is a time to pause, evaluate, and if necessary, realign the action or decision with the vision. Or if it doesn’t fit the vision, forgo it completely. The vision will provide the guidance people need to make the right decisions.

Possibly the most significant benefit of having a clear vision is that it can be motivating and inspiring for people around you. When an individual understands and aligns with the core values and vision of the organization, they can readily commit to, and engage in, the organization’s efforts. Engaged and inspired personnel can go a long way in helping the organization achieve its goals. Having a clear and inspiring vision helps to keep organizations focused and together, especially when working on complex initiatives, and during stressful times. If people have a solid understanding of the vision, the teams will be able to build a better product or service. If everybody is aligned around the product vision, the dream, the goals, and the objectives, your chances of “building the right thing” are much higher.

Apart from building a better product, teams usually become more self-managing when the vision and strategy are clear to them. They will be able to make more day-to-day decisions themselves, and they will be able to contribute to the vision and strategy by sharing their knowledge and insights. This increased self-management of the teams allows the Product Owner to spend more time on other responsibilities, and the team members’ contributions will improve the vision and strategy.

Research has proven many additional benefits of having a clear vision. Through experience in practice, we mostly learned that regularly taking a Visionary stance as a Product Owner will lead to improved product usage, increased revenues, an improved total cost of ownership, and increased customer satisfaction. So, what’s holding you back? Time to take the Visionary stance!

Let’s summarize what great Visionary Product Owners do:

• Personal belief in the vision: Visionary Product Owners are personally bought into the vision. It is as if the vision is inside them. The vision is theirs and they are the vision. They are connected to the vision; they live it and breathe it. If you don’t believe in your personnel, product, or company vision, how can you be the visionary and inspirational (product) leader to follow?

• Think of what might be, forget about what is: Great visionaries are optimistic about the future. They are also consumed with making tomorrow better than today. These visionary and hopeful leaders never settle with today being good enough. They always strive to make tomorrow even better. It is this focus in combination with a relentless challenge of the status quo that makes great visionary leaders so successful.

• Visionary Product Owners are imaginative and focus on the bigger picture: Visionary people can visualize things easily. They have great imagination and visualization skills. It is as if they can see the future. Visionaries can imagine future possibilities in their minds and then explain what they have imagined. They can explain it so clearly, it is as if they have already been there.

• Apply storytelling to your vision: It starts when we’re just little children, and it never ends. We all love great stories! Whether it was listening to our parents reading us stories when we were kids, playing video games with a great storyline, or binge-watching a new Netflix series, we all love stories. And great visionaries know this. Great visionaries not only can define, create, shape, and visualize a vision, they also are awesome storytellers, which makes the vision memorable.

• Visionary leaders are inclusive, not exclusive: Great visionary leaders share and communicate their dream/vision. One sign of working with a Visionary Product Owner is their willingness to share the vision with the world. Great visionaries don’t keep their vision to themselves because they know that they cannot get to the destination alone. Visionary leaders however are also accepting of the change. They are open to inviting others to join in their vision, but also to add to it and make it their own.

• They are never afraid of failures: As mentioned earlier, true visionaries see what others cannot see. They see the big picture. They see the links among different events. They see possible obstacles. Great visionaries know that Winston Churchill was right when he said, “Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”

Connecting the Product Vision to the Company Mission, Vision, and Values

Before diving into the topic of vision, let’s pause for a moment to clarify some terms. What we often find is that there are many definitions and interpretations of what “vision,” “mission,” “purpose,” and “strategy” mean. Different people have different definitions of these terms. So do many organizations. Let’s start with some definitions so that you’ll know what we refer to in the context of this book.

The vision usually describes a problem to be solved, and the mission describes how the company will contribute to solving that problem. The mission is typically defined based on the vision and is often also considered to be the purpose of the organization. The mission describes what a company seeks to achieve, what it seeks to contribute to the world, and how it wishes to do so.

For some companies, the mission will be about generating knowledge through research. For others, it might be about building bridges and connecting people. Both statements should not describe business results, goals, objectives, or deliverables. Instead, they should describe how the company makes the world a better place.

Let’s explore the following mission and vision statements, read them slowly, and imagine what the company could be about:

• The mission is to entertain, inform, and inspire people around the globe through the power of unparalleled storytelling, reflecting the iconic brands, creative minds, and innovative technologies that make ours the world’s premier entertainment company.

• To make people happy, especially children.

To which company do you think these mission statements belong? The correct answer is that these statements are from the Walt Disney Company. Which sentence is most inspiring to you? The mission or the vision? It’s likely that the second statement (the vision) is more inspiring to you. Vision statements are usually shorter and more inspiring, while mission statements are longer and offer more details on how to achieve the vision.

Most organizations also define company values. These values describe the core behaviors, values, and principles that the company and its people operate from. The company values should not change often, as they form the heart of how the company and its people behave. Company values should be more than just a description, though. Some companies write down beautiful statements of their values; however, when taking a closer look, you don’t see people behaving that way. We believe that company values are not so much defined by how you describe them on paper, but by the behaviors that people display. People should display the company values consistently, as they are the deep-seated core values at the heart of the organization.

As mentioned before, the company vision is a, usually brief, description of the future state of the world. It often describes the complex problem to be solved, or the ambition/purpose to be achieved. The vision describes what ultimate value a company seeks to deliver, and it guides the company on its journey to get there. If a vision changes frequently, it becomes difficult for companies and their people to deliver coherent products and services that serve as stepping stones towards that desired vision.

Here are a couple of examples of vision statements for your inspiration:

Facebook: Connect with friends and the world around you.

LinkedIn: Create economic opportunities for every member of the global workforce.

Teach for America: One day, all children in this nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education.

Alzheimer’s Association: A world without Alzheimer’s and all other dementia.

The Nature Conservancy: To leave a sustainable world for future generations.

After the vision comes strategy as the next step. Strategy is a description of how the company is going to achieve its vision. It’s a measurable, actionable form of planning, and usually contains goals to be achieved. You should be able to explain the strategy of a company based on the products it creates and how those products get created. After all, what is the strategy trying to achieve if not the company mission? And what is the mission if it is not an embodiment of the vision?

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

—Sun Tzu

Some organizations add additional layers of goals, objectives, key results, and others between the company vision and the product portfolio. So, the terminology used in this book might be slightly different from how your organization implemented these terms. Regardless, having and developing products and services should serve as evidence of the strategy a company has. A product is more than a collection of features, components, tools, and technologies.

In Tables 8.1 and 8.2, you will find vision, mission, and strategy examples for inspiration.

A Product Vision Aligned with the Company Mission and Vision

A Product Owner should be able to influence the company strategy (at least to some extent) by finding new and innovative ways to create value for customers, the company, and society. Of course, Product Owners should be thinking about the company mission and vision and how their work contributes to achieving the mission and vision. The main concern for a Product Owner is the product or service itself, and that this product or service solves customer problems and generates value.

Product Owners play a key role in the bridging of a vacuum (as illustrated in Figure 8.1) that often exists between company vision and strategy, and the daily work and operations that teams perform. This vacuum is called the product management vacuum, and Product Owners play an important role in resolving it.

Think of your organization. How well are the teams in your company aligned to what the executives want to achieve? How well are the executives informed about what is really happening on the work floor?

Chances are that there is not enough alignment. It happens quite often that the executives are not aware of what really happens. And it is quite common that employees do not exactly know what is to be achieved and how they can contribute to that. This phenomenon of misalignment is often referred to as “watermelon reporting.”

Watermelon reporting describes the phenomenon where things appear to be green on the outside (like a watermelon). In other words, the status reports and management dashboards are displaying green lights and little to no issues. However, like with a watermelon, once you slice it open and delve a bit deeper into those status updates, dashboards, and reports, you will find that most of the stuff is red. It is not going well, and serious issues might be present. Watermelon reporting often happens in organizations where fear, stress, and anxiety rule. It also happens often if there is a disconnect between the company strategy (what C-level management aims to achieve) and what happens on the work floor (what employees and teams do daily).

Product Owners play a crucial part in resolving the product management vacuum. Their effectiveness in resolving this vacuum determines the influence they can exert on the company strategy itself. The more alignment from top to bottom in the company you can create, the more people will notice your contributions, and the more influence you will gain over time. Let us look at some of the ideas that put the Product Owner in a position for resolving that vacuum. The Agile Manifesto makes no literal mention of vision or mission. However, vision has a key role if you can read between the lines:

1. 1. “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.” If our highest priority is to deliver value early and often, we should have a good understanding of what value is for our customers, which means that we need to have a clear vision of this.

2. 2. “Welcome changing requirements, even late in development.” Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage. If one of our goals in Agile is to enable a competitive advantage for our customers, that means that we should have a clear understanding of our customers, their problems, needs, and goals. But we should also try to obtain a good understanding of their vision, strategy, goals, objectives, and business model, right?

3. 10. “Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential.” To maximize the amount of work not done, and to try to keep the product as simple as possible. Stick to the core of the product and its customers’ needs. We need to have a clear understanding of the product’s purpose.

In summary, Product Owners need to connect company mission, vision, and strategy to product vision and strategy to solve the product management vacuum. Defining and communicating product vision and strategy effectively helps create focus, inspire people, create alignment, and build better products. But how do you create and communicate your product vision effectively?

Elements of an Inspiring Product Vision

A product vision can be looked at from many angles, and each angle offers a different perspective on how it represents the strategy. Table 8.3 lists various tools, canvases, and formats for capturing your Product Vision.

Many tools for creating a vision can be used. There is a wide variety of tools and canvases available, some even for specific products and contexts (like hardware or marketing). We recommend you search the web for these tools, including how-to guides and explanations. There are various helpful how-to guides for creating your product vision (like on our blog: www.medium.com/the-value-maximizers), which is why this isn’t included in this book.

What all these tools have in common is that they connect the customer problem(s) to solve to the business impacts to be achieved, while also sketching a picture of what the future could look like. What worked very well for us in the past is to make vision-creation a collaborative exercise. Although you could create a product vision on your own, it is often more interesting, more fun, and more valuable to create the vision together. Also, remember that taking the Visionary stance doesn’t mean that you need to come up with everything yourself! Leading and facilitating people in creating the vision is also important. So, don’t worry if you don’t have a big and ambitious vision (yet). Bring the right people on board to help create it.

Creating a vision is just the first step though. Once you have defined the vision, including the target audience, problems to solve, revenue and cost streams, and the unique value proposition, the actual work is about to get started. Creating, defining, or documenting the product vision is typically not the biggest challenge you see. The bigger challenge is to communicate the vision effectively and to get people to buy into that vision. Even more so, it is about getting people to support the vision, and communicate it themselves.

So, what do you do next? Well, it’s time to start communicating your vision! Once you have discovered the crucial elements of your product vision, you should start communicating and pitching the vision. What you’ll probably learn by doing so is that different audiences require different approaches. Some are more interested in the value a product offers, others wonder about the changes required to create the product, and some might be afraid of what this means for their products or services. In the next chapter, we’ll explore how to communicate vision through storytelling. But before doing so, Table 8.4 shows some do’s and don’ts to consider before you start communicating, pitching, and storytelling your vision.