What is a Vision?

A vision is a vivid picture of the future you aim to create. It's an aspirational statement that guides and inspires your team by providing a clear sense of direction and purpose. It offers the opportunity for alignment and buy in, if done collaboratively. Leading a vision session involves facilitating discussions that explore aspirations, insights, challenges, and opportunities both in regard to current state and future trends. As a leader, product manager and facilitator you should encourage open dialogue, debate and creative thinking, ensuring all voices are heard. Documenting the ideas and synthesizing them into a coherent vision statement is critical.

The Cascade of Visions Around You

In a large enterprise, your vision is part of the broader picture. It’s essential to align your vision not only upwards with organizational goals but also sideways with other departments. This alignment ensures coherence and collaboration across the organization. Understanding the overarching company vision and cascading it down to your team, in fact personalising for your team and/or product, ensuring you identify how you can deliver on that vision and that your goals support the larger mission, is critical.

A vision should not only cascade up, down, but also sideways throughout the organization, aligning with departmental goals too. Each layer of the organization should understand how their work contributes to the overarching vision and to each other. Engage with other departments to align strategies and avoid siloed thinking. Regular inter-departmental meetings and debates should foster alignment and synergy. It’s critical to spend time debating strategy and get aligned; the tactics will work themselves out. Your focus should be the debate around strategy.

Team visions versus product visions

Crafting a vision firstly takes understanding what the vision is for. Is this for an organisation, a business unit, or a product? Is this something that will be used externally, or only internally during strategy alignment sessions? How you do an organisational & business unit vision, differs to how you do a product vision. With the first you focus in on defining the culture, purpose and mission and your vision arises from those things; this is what brings alignment to a diverse team. With the latter, you focus on identifying your users/customers, your products benefits, differentiators and problems, your product vision arises from these things; here you align around the product itself and the value it brings the users/customers. There is a huge difference between a product vision versus an organisational or team vision.

Just a note about Product visions and where they sit. A product vision sits with the PRODUCT, so you will need to have the conversation around WHERE and what the product is. Sometimes in very large enterprises, there are multiple products, often disparate  and not connected, other times there is only one unified product. The next step for those with multiple products is really about sitting down with that product leader to talk about the future of those multiple products; what does that look like. Once you understand that context and where you are headed you can make a decision about where the product vision should be. Certainly there is a view that there should only be one product vision, but that is not often the case, or appropriate, depending on the organisation and what is going on internally.

HOW A VISION SHAPES YOUR STRATEGIES

A vision sets the strategic direction. It shapes your choice of strategic goals and hence your priorities, roadmaps, backlogs and then should guide resource allocation, and inform decision-making processes. A strong vision ensures that every strategic initiative aligns with the desired future state. There should be nothing on your roadmap, in your plans, or in your backlog, that does not align and deliver on that vision. Delete it, or de-prioritise it, if there is; or at the very least at least negotiate about it, utilizing your data.

GATHERING INSIGHTS: Discovery & ANALYsis

Effective visioning requires a deep understanding of the internal and external environment for both current state and future trends. This discovery phase is critical to forming a vision that is both ambitious and achievable. You should be doing some discovery and analysis to prepare for the workshop and then after you're finished, to substantiate, or validate your strategic goals and thinking. Is this the right goal and target, are we heading down the right path.

To craft a robust vision, you need a deep understanding of the external and internal factors impacting your business. Several analytical tools can help:
  1. PESTLE Analysis: Examine Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental factors to identify external opportunities and threats.
  2. Megatrends Analysis: Look at long-term, global trends that could shape your industry, such as demographic shifts or technological advancements.
  3. Three Horizons Framework: Assess current business operations (Horizon 1), emerging opportunities (Horizon 2), and long-term innovations (Horizon 3) to balance short-term goals with future growth.
  4. SWOT Analysis: What are the organizations or products strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Especially focus in on the problems and opportunities that currently exists.
  5. Data Analysis: What current data do you have, where are the issues, churn and barriers, what does growth look like where; gather this data to be able to make sound decisions.

Collaborating with Your Team

A successful vision workshop hinges on collaboration and debate. Engage your team and key stakeholders from the start, fostering an environment where everyone feels their input is valued. This inclusivity ensures that the vision reflects a collective mindset and garners broad support and buying. Here’s how to set the stage:
  1. Preparation: Collect data, do the analysis, including current market trends, industry horizons, tech trends and internal performance data, to ground everyone in the context. Kick off the session with this, to level set everyone and get them ideating on the problems and opportunities that will bring your product or team.
  2. Diverse Participation: Include team members & stakeholders from different departments and levels to provide a holistic perspective and gather buy-in.
  3. Facilitation: Use a skilled facilitator to guide discussions and ensure every voice is heard.
  4. Debate: Debate about the words, essentially wordsmithing until you get alignment. Read it out loud multiple times until the vision sings!
  5. Share and Publish: get your vision on a roadshow, share with teams beside you, share with leaders above you, get feedback and tweak, iterate until it starts to really be bedded down and finalised. Then publish broadly.

Defining Strategic Goals

With a clear vision, the next step is to outline strategic goals. Your vision will help prioritize these goals, but it also means making tough decisions about what to pursue and what to set aside.
  • Sort Problems & Opportunities: Sort the problems and opportunities from the ideation until you get higher level themes, this is where you should start writing your strategic goals from. Then debate back and forth, always asking why, why, why until you identify the strategic goal. A good strategic goal, comes from your problems and opportunities, offers coherence, helps you identify the actions you need to take
  • Strategic Goals versus Operational Goals: be on the lookout for operational goals posing as strategic goals. They differ in terms of scope, focus and time. A strategic goal is something that will take much longer to realise; multiple quarters to years, they focus on things like growth of markets, new customers, innovation, increasing revenue and they are much broader in scope. Operational goals are short, they can be delivered in a sprint or a quarter and are usually deliverables such as performance uplift, tech debt, cost reduction. So debate and keep digging into the why behind these; the intent; this is where your strategic goal lies.
  • SMART Goals: Ensure your goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Now a word about SMART goals. Sometimes this isn’t possible, as you don’t yet have the information or data. Don’t be too fussed on this point, rather ensure that you next step is discovery, to validate your strategic goal, ensuring that you gather data in the discovery process.
  • Prioritization: Use frameworks like the Eisenhower Matrix to prioritize tasks based on urgency and importance.
  • Saying No: Recognize that you can’t pursue every opportunity. Focus on goals that align most closely with your vision and will have the greatest impact.

Executing the Vision

Once your vision and strategic goals are in place, execution becomes critical. Develop a clear action plan, assign responsibilities, and set milestones to track progress.
  • Communication: Regularly communicate the vision and goals to keep the team aligned and motivated.
  • Monitoring and Adjusting: Continuously monitor progress and be ready to adjust strategies as needed. Flexibility is key to responding to new challenges and opportunities.
In conclusion, a vision workshop is not just a planning session but a strategic exercise in alignment, buyin, analysis, and prioritization. By fostering debate, collaboration, conducting thorough analyses, aligning with broader corporate strategies, and clearly defining strategic goals, you set the stage for your team to deliver on a compelling vision. Remember, it's not about you or others individually; it's about the vision you collectively strive to identify and achieve. It is not a solo exercise.



 
 
 

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