In coaching teams and individuals, one of the things I say ALL the time is that “Everything starts with a Vision”. It doesn't matter if its a personal vision, a business vision or a product vision. You have to put a stake in the ground and call it! Where are you going, does it inspire you, is it a big enough why to keep you focused and driving forward?
We often talk about visions in the context of leadership and product management, but visions really start at a more personal level. Setting a clear personal life vision is about identifying purpose, values, and long-term outcomes. It is about living a life in alignment with that vision, that includes your words and actions. It is about setting a direction and declaring “this not that” and then clarifying the actions you need to take in line with realizing that vision. A personal life vision mirrors the creation of a product or team vision, with both requiring deep clarity, strategic choices and intention. The difference being that product visions require healthy debate with a team to build alignment and buyin. A personal vision doesn't require debate, but it does require choosing!
What Is a Personal Life Vision?
A personal life vision is a clear picture of the life you want to create, encompassing your values, purpose, and long-term aspirations. It acts as a guiding light for the decisions you make and the paths you take. It helps you to stay focused, especially when life gets choppy. Creating one isn’t simply about achieving goals; it’s about aligning with what truly matters to you on a deeper, more conscious level. Fulfilling on your desires and who you want to be as a human being. It is not only about chasing the materialistic, but also about who you want to be as a conscious human being, about your spiritual philosophies and outcomes in areas such as career, finances, family, friends and social life; it is about the WHOLE human being. By doing so, you create a life that feels purposeful, fulfilled, and authentic. It is a creative process and if you live a life of high integrity, your words actually have power and you will be more likely to manifest your vision, than not.
Ways to Create a Life Vision
Now there are a hundred ways that you can go about creating a vision for yourself, you can write it in a document, you can collage images into a vision board, you can creatively write a story or song; whatever works for you. For me, I do my vision every two years as an online word document, with images included, in the areas of life I want to focus on for those two years. Coupled with this you could also lean into any of the below approaches; what's key is to find the approach that you love as you will be more likely to do it on a regular basis. The idea is to do it regularly, so it becomes a habit in your life. With a vision in place, YOU get to say how your life goes, rather than being buffeted by the winds of change in life.
Visualization and Manifestation: This involves mentally projecting yourself into the future. Close your eyes and imagine the life you want. What does it look like? How does it feel? Visualization can be paired with manifestation practices, where you believe and behave as though your vision is already happening. I actually do this everyday, so I can connect to my vision with images and emotions. The more you can visualise it, the more chance you have of fulfilling it. So work at increasing the color, the sound, the smells, bring it closer, be in the first person and stay connected to those images of the future.
Ikigai: Originating from Japan, *Ikigai* is a concept that translates to "reason for being." It combines your passion, mission, vocation, and profession into a life purpose. You ask yourself: What do I love? What am I good at? What does the world need? What can I be paid for? I will write a separate blog on this, so stay tuned.
Spiritual Purpose Exploration: Many seek their life vision through spiritual practices; whether through meditation, prayer, or mindful reflection. This process helps uncover your higher purpose or calling, connecting with something greater than yourself. A popular way is mindfulness, by taking your mind and focusing it on things like breathing and walking, it allows you to reduce stress and connect to the creative part of the brain; where you are more likely to find your purpose.
Relating Life Vision to Product Vision
Just as we craft a life vision for ourselves, product managers and leaders are tasked with leading a team in creating a vision. Gone are the days where you sat alone in a room and wrote it up yourself, then told others what it was and what they will be doing. A vision provides a guiding north star for the teams, or the product's future, defining the purpose and the outcomes that will drive its evolution and deliver on the organizations vision. I have worked with a lot of teams on identifying their product or team's vision and it is always fascinating to me at how "unaligned" the team is at the beginning and then how, walking them through the exercises, they become super aligned, which drives buy in and increases motivation. Doing it TOGETHER brings alignment AND buyin, it is not the leaders vision, it becomes OUR vision. So so critical to debate the vision and the leader or product manager becomes the facilitator of the debate, rather than the sole writer and together you shape the vision!
What Is a Product Vision?
A product vision is a forward-looking statement that describes what the product aims to achieve in the long term. It is aspirational and focuses on the value the product will deliver to their users or the market/s. Unlike a business vision, which may address broad company goals like market dominance or financial growth, a product vision zeroes in on the purpose and impact of a specific product. It then helps to structure and focus conversations & debate around which strategic goal to focus on.
Key Differences Between a Product Vision and a Business Vision
Business Visions and product visions differ in a few critical ways and how you write up your product vision is not the same as would for your business vision. Below are three elements where they differ:
- Scope: A product vision is narrower, focused solely on the product and the experience it delivers to users. A business vision covers the entire organization and its overall strategic goals.
- Audience: A business vision may be aimed at investors, employees, and stakeholders, while a product vision is geared towards users and customers, offering value and solving problems specific to them.
- Time Horizon: Business visions can span decades, while product visions often look towards a few years of strategic direction, allowing for agility and adaptation to market needs.
Identifying and Creating a Product Vision
When identifying a product vision, the process mirrors the creation of a personal life vision in many ways. Here's how to get started:
Clarify Purpose
Just as you would define your life’s purpose, defining the product's purpose is critical. What is key here is debating with the team and yes, essentially you will be wordsmithing and debating over each singular word until you get alignment. From this will come your vision and I love Geoffrey Moore's Vision Statement structure for product visions. In answering the below with the team, you can work on writing out a vision statement from the answers:
- What problem is this product solving?
- What impact or benefits will this product have on its users and the market?
- How does it align with the company’s core mission?
- What differentiates this product from other similar products?
Focus on Outcomes
Your product vision should help you with your strategic goals and to identify the long-term outcomes you aim to achieve for your users, or customers, that will help you move the dial on product outcomes and deliver on business outcomes. Think in terms of how your product changes lives or solves problems at a deeper level, just like a life vision looks to achieve fulfillment and purpose.
Create a User-Centered Vision
As with life visioning, where you think about how your purpose aligns with the needs of the world, product visions should be centered around the users. Identify who they are and empathize with their pain points, desires, and aspirations that go into your opportunity map.
Communicate the Vision
A product vision, like a life vision, needs to be shared and communicated effectively. In life, you might share your vision with mentors, friends, or a community. In product management, or an organisation, your vision should be communicated clearly to the team, in fact debated with them; then shared with stakeholders, leaders and possibly even customers. Take the time to gather feedback and more data, as your vision might need some tweaking.
Be Open to Change
Just as life changes and our personal vision evolves, so too must a product vision adapt over time. Market conditions, customer feedback, and technological advancements may require refining the vision as you go.
In Summary
Whether you're crafting a life vision or a product vision, the core principles remain remarkably similar. Both require deep clarity of purpose, a focus on long-term outcomes, and flexibility to adapt as conditions change. When you take the time to thoughtfully create these visions—whether for your life or your product—you set the stage for intentional, impactful outcomes that resonate deeply with those they touch.
Like the life vision that manifests your ideal future, a product vision aligns the team around a shared, aspirational purpose, driving towards a better tomorrow for your users and your product. So as you work on crafting your next product vision, take a moment to reflect: What is the vision you hold for your life? How can the clarity of that vision inform the products you build and the value you bring?
Now more than ever in today's product development environments, teams are constantly under pressure to balance shifting priorities, deliver value quickly, and remain adaptable. Agile methodologies, such as Scrum, provide structure and efficiency, helping teams to organize and manage their workflows. However, as these teams mature, they often crave a more intuitive and adaptive way to approach their work; one that aligns with a deeper sense of engagement and flow.
Back in the 1970’s Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a positive psychologist, introduced the idea of flow to the world. In his seminal work "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience", Csíkszentmihályi outlined his theory that people are happiest when they are in a state of flow; a state of concentration, or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation. It is a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. When you are in the state of flow, you are in the “zone” you feel deeply connected to the task at hand, and your productivity and creativity are elevated without the usual stress or friction. Time seems to dissolve, and actions seem to flow effortlessly from one to the next. We have all experienced this, for me it used to be when I was running and now, it's when I am teaching or writing blogs (I know...).
Now imagine if our Agile practices right throughout the organisation, worked in this way, delivering value, effortlessly and easily with no impediments, so that you end up in the state of flow. Joy oh joy!!
Flow occurs when three key conditions are met:
This experience, often referred to as being “in the zone,” is characterized by a sense of ease, mastery, and deep satisfaction. When people are in a flow state, they perform at their best, with minimal resistance, and feel a heightened sense of achievement and fulfillment.
Flow Agile: Where Spiritual Engagement Meets Product Development
Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow aligns deeply with the principles of Flow Agile. Both emphasize adaptability, continuous feedback, and alignment with a clear goal. Agile methodologies are designed to optimize the continuous delivery of value, and flow embodies this essence by focusing on smooth, unhindered progress toward achieving meaningful results.
As product teams mature in their Agile practices, they begin to seek out ways to move beyond the rigid adherence to frameworks and its repetitive iterations and hierarchical signs offs. While Agile frameworks provide structure and organization, they can sometimes be restrictive. As teams become more experienced, they naturally evolve toward a more fluid and intuitive approach that mirrors the effortless engagement of flow.
This is where Flow Agile enters the picture, blending the principles of Agile with the profound insights of Csikszentmihalyi’s flow state.
What is Flow Agile?
Flow Agile is a mindset and methodology that emphasizes optimizing the flow of work, minimizing bottlenecks, and ensuring that tasks move smoothly through development pipelines. It encourages teams to focus less on strict processes and more on creating an environment where work can progress seamlessly, without unnecessary interruptions, delays, sign offs and hierarchy.
Flow, represents an evolution beyond Agile, emphasizing value as the central focus of business operations. Unlike traditional frameworks like Lean or Agile, which often prioritize efficiency, iterations and waste reduction, Flow puts the customer’s success at the forefront, reshaping how organizations deliver value. It shifts from seeing value through the company's lens to a broader understanding of what truly benefits and attracts the customer. This philosophy acknowledges that, in today’s world, especially with the rise of subscription-based models, businesses must engage in lifelong direct relationships with customers, or users. We see the result of this in the way that organisations such as Google, Facebook and Netflix continually add large value to their offerings, often at no additional cost to the consumer (e.g. Google productivity tools, Netflix games catalogue, Facebook/Instagram business accounts). Flow equips organizations with tools to uncover unmet or even unrealized customer needs, emphasizing the need for continuous adaptation in how they work, collaborate, and innovate. Discovery becomes central to the day to day.
One of the key aspects of Flow is its emphasis on improving social interaction within teams and the broader organization. It recognizes that value creation is not solely a result of streamlined processes but is deeply tied to how well people collaborate and make decisions together, within teams, is essential for delivering value. The visualization of workflows, as seen in Kanban, is expanded in Flow to power deeper social engagement, and roles such as coaches, rather than traditional leaders, become instrumental in facilitating this shift, by helping to foster better decision-making in complex systems.. Furthermore, Flow’s introduction of tools like Transformation Sprints, which apply Agile principles to large-scale transformations, and the Lighthouse Project, which replaces MVP with a focus on unique organizational contexts. Flow tools include market dynamics analysis, innovation targeting, ecosystem support, and portfolio management all of which allows for large-scale change initiatives to be navigated with agility, ensuring that value continuously flows through the organization without being hindered by outdated structures or poor project management. Ultimately, Flow redefines how businesses approach both customer success and internal dynamics, advocating for a holistic, value-driven system of work that is adaptive, collaborative, and focused on delivering true outcomes.
Key Concepts of Flow and Flow in Agile:
Flow is a Post-Agile Concept focusing on delivering value at the heart of all enterprise operations. While Agile emphasizes efficiency and process, Flow is about discovering, managing, and delivering value throughout the organization, including at the code level, with customer outcomes taking priority over what firms want to deliver, aka the old command and control model of project managing products, delivering only on business objectives.
The perception of value has shifted, now focusing on the success it brings to customers rather than just the goals of the organisation. The customer success movement, originating in the SaaS industry, has influenced team behaviors. Flow provides tools to identify customer needs and determine how to deliver the success customers seek.
The philosophical approach is very different in Flow. Flow Academy introduced a unique approach that emphasizes value beyond traditional lean and Agile principles. It seeks to address the stress and absence customers often feel from corporations, offering tools to better understand and serve customer success and while Agile and Lean have become business norms, Flow supports deeper customer needs and greater team autonomy. Toyota's shift from Lean to Flow in 2019 highlights Flow's growing influence in achieving business agility, beyond software agility!
Flow views operating models as dynamic, encouraging continuous learning and feedback loops to adapt to market changes and customer needs. It promotes a culture of continuous integration and delivery, ensuring that innovations flow seamlessly without being blocked by outdated processes or poor management techniques.
Why Product Development Teams Should Move Toward Flow Agile
As product teams evolve in their Agile journey, many find themselves naturally moving from rigid methodologies and repetitive iterations & meetings, toward more adaptive approaches that prioritize flow. Here’s why Flow Agile represents the next step in Agile maturity:
1. Enhanced Flexibility: Flow Agile allows teams to respond quickly to changes without being constrained by fixed cycles or processes. This is particularly important in dynamic markets where priorities can shift unexpectedly, and teams need the ability to pivot seamlessly.
2. Reduced Friction: By minimizing process-driven obstacles, teams can focus on delivering value without getting bogged down by unnecessary steps. This creates an environment where work flows naturally, reducing stress and increasing productivity.
3. Stronger Focus on Value: Flow Agile ensures that every task is aligned with delivering real value to customers and stakeholders. By minimizing work-in-progress and focusing on outcomes identified in strategy sessions, teams can be more effective in achieving their goals.
4. Seamless Adaptation: Flow Agile encourages continuous learning and adaptation. Teams can respond to feedback and market changes as they happen, without waiting for formal ceremonies or reviews.
5. Greater Engagement and Satisfaction: By aligning with the principles of flow, teams can achieve higher levels of engagement and satisfaction. When team members are fully immersed in their work and experience a state of flow, they not only perform better but also enjoy their work more deeply.
Implementing Flow Agile in Product Development Teams
To implement Flow Agile, start by introducing the team to the concept of flow and how it applies to both their work and personal productivity. It
involves shifting the focus from time-boxed iterations to a continuous delivery of work, prioritizing flow efficiency. Encourage the team to:
Shift to Continuous Workflows
- Visualize Workflows: The team should begin by visualizing their work on a Kanban board. This helps to focus on limiting work in progress (WIP) and enables better flow of tasks.
- Limit WIP: Implement WIP limits to encourage teams to finish tasks before starting new ones. This creates a continuous flow of value, as opposed to batching work into sprints.
- Pull System: Transition from a push (assigning work) to a pull system (where team members pull tasks when ready), allowing for a more organic and sustainable workload distribution.
Rethink Meetings and Ceremonies
- Encourage Self-Organization: Allow teams to determine how best to approach their work, fostering a sense of ownership and autonomy. No need to follow iterations and scrum meetings, only do what works for the team, whether that is Kanban, Scrum, a combination, etc.
- Daily Standups: While still valuable, daily standups can evolve to focus less on what was done during a sprint and more on removing blockers and discussing WIP. As flow improves, the need for daily standups may reduce in frequency.
- Sprint Planning: Replace sprint planning meetings with ongoing backlog refinement. Since there are no fixed-length sprints, prioritize work continuously based on business needs and capacity. Planning happens "just in time" rather than at the start of each sprint.
- Retrospectives: These can remain, but they may happen less frequently (e.g., monthly or when bottlenecks are identified) since continuous improvement in flow-based Agile happens in real time, responding to immediate feedback on processes.
- Sprint Reviews/Demos: Shift these to happen when work is completed rather than on a fixed sprint schedule. Product reviews or demos occur when significant deliverables are ready for stakeholders to see.
Adopt a Flow Mindset
- Focus on Cycle Time: Instead of focusing on sprint velocity, measure cycle time (how long it takes for a task to move from start to finish). Aim to reduce bottlenecks and improve lead time.
- Emphasize Throughput: Teams should measure and optimize throughput, ensuring work is delivered at a steady pace.
- Continuous Feedback: Encourage realtime feedback and improvements to happen continually in order to adjust work as you go, not just at the end of sprints.
Automate and Optimize Processes
- Automation: Increase the use of automation to reduce repetitive tasks and streamline hand-offs. Automated testing, deployments, and other DevOps practices align well with flow-based Agile, helping ensure continuous delivery. CI/CD & TDD are a must.
- Optimize for Flow: Continuously identify and remove bottlenecks or inefficiencies that block the flow of work.
Cultural and Mindset Change
- Encourage teams to embrace continuous delivery and move away from the comfort of sprints. This shift involves a cultural change that promotes ongoing delivery and fast feedback, rather than waiting for the next sprint.
- Leadership should support the team by enabling faster decision-making and providing the tools necessary to remove impediments quickly.
- Promote Cross-Functional Collaboration: Ensure that teams collaborate closely with stakeholders to avoid bottlenecks and improve the flow of work.
In Summary
Flow Agile embodies the essence of both the spiritual flow described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and the adaptability of Agile. By focusing on flexibility, value, and continuous feedback, product development teams can reach new heights of productivity, engagement, and satisfaction. Teams are no longer held by repetitive ceremonies, or iterations of work. Flow Agile allows teams to transcend rigid processes and embrace the fluid nature of work, aligning themselves with a greater purpose and delivering value with ease and efficiency. Imagine being in the zone at work!
Product discovery is where product managers (PMs) can bring their unique value to the forefront. However, many PMs face an identity crisis. Designers create highly usable prototypes, and software engineers turn these prototypes into functional products. Where does this leave product managers? Too often, PMs are reduced to order-takers, especially in organizations that haven’t empowered their product teams. This situation frequently results from legacy behaviors like SAFe and Waterfall that emphasize delivery over discovery.
The Legacy of Feature Factories
In organizations where stakeholders dictate what to build, product teams often become feature factories. Unfortunately as PMs we must meet the system where it is, but they also need to work towards changing this situation over time.
The Three Phases of Product Development
Product development can be divided into three phases: strategy discovery, product discovery, and delivery. Strategy discovery focuses on where to concentrate your efforts. Product discovery focuses on identifying how to solve problems that will deliver value and hence fulfils on your strategy, and delivery is the act of building and shipping. Unfortunately, in Australia and elsewhere, too much focus is placed on delivery, neglecting the discovery phases that are critical to success.
What is Product Discovery? Product discovery involves exploring, validating, and defining solutions that deliver value to users and the business. Its primary goal is to reduce uncertainty by testing ideas early and often, ensuring the product developed is the right fit for the market. PMs should lead some of the discovery efforts, partnering with design and engineering teams to foster debate and collaboration. A PM’s unique value lies in their ability to make informed decisions because they should be across the product, the organization, the market, and the customer domains.
The Three Barriers to Product Discovery
- Discovery Isn’t Viewed as Part of the Role
Many organizations believe that a PM’s job revolves around delivery, driven by frameworks like SAFe that focus on backlogs and roadmaps. This misunderstanding is also perpetuated by leaders and stakeholders who believe they should tell PMs what to build. However studies from Microsoft, Google, and Slack show that 80% of features across industries are rarely or never used. Skipping discovery wastes time, effort, and resources. - They Don’t Know How to Do Discovery
Discovery is a broad and deep concept. Without proper training, many PMs focus solely on delivery, avoiding discovery altogether. It’s important to distinguish discovery from research. While research is strategic and informs both product strategy and discovery, discovery should be fast and lead to decisions. A well-executed discovery process, typically completed within four days, helps teams identify the right problems and solutions to focus on. - They Don’t Prioritize Discovery
In organizations that prioritize delivery and velocity over value, discovery is often overlooked. PMs need senior leadership buy-in to elevate the importance of discovery, fostering a culture of innovation and experimentation.
Designers Do It All: A Missed Opportunity
Many designers focus on tactical tasks, like fast discovery and usability, but miss opportunities for deeper, strategic research. Deep research skills shape product strategy and enhance the discovery process. True discovery involves the entire team, not just designers. PMs and engineers should contribute to usability testing, learning about customer needs, and collaborating to deliver value.
Many designers focus on tactical tasks, like fast discovery and usability, but miss opportunities for deeper, strategic research. Deep research skills shape product strategy and enhance the discovery process. True discovery involves the entire team, not just designers. PMs and engineers should contribute to usability testing, learning about customer needs, and collaborating to deliver value.
Improving Discovery
Discovery is a team sport, and PMs should lead the charge in the opportunity & problem spaces, partnering with Designers and Engineers on the rest. Here are steps to strengthen your discovery process:
- Invest in Training
Learn essential discovery techniques like user interviews, pain point analysis, design sprints, and opportunity solution trees. These tools will help PMs lead discovery confidently. Bringing in product coaches can accelerate this process. - Build or Find Templates
For product leaders, creating templates in tools like Miro or Mural can help guide teams through processes like the Double Diamond or design sprints. - Embrace Collaboration
Collaboration between PMs, designers, and engineers is critical in discovery. PMs should focus on the opportunity space, problem framing, and setting goals, while working closely with design and engineering on execution.
Key Discovery Techniques to Master
- Design Thinking
A user-centered approach to problem-solving, design thinking guides teams through empathy, ideation, prototyping, and testing. - Marty Cagan’s Principles of Discovery
Cagan emphasizes starting with the problem, collaborating with cross-functional teams, and testing ideas early and often. - The Double Diamond Framework
This framework divides discovery and delivery into four stages: Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver, encouraging teams to explore and narrow down solutions. - Jake Knapp’s Design Sprint
A five-day process that compresses weeks of discovery into a short timeframe, focusing on understanding, sketching, deciding, prototyping, and testing solutions. - Teresa Torres’s Continuous Discovery
Torres advocates for ongoing user research and rapid prototyping, ensuring alignment between user needs and business goals.
In Conclusion
Product discovery is essential for building successful products. By leveraging design thinking, continuous discovery, and frameworks like the Double Diamond and Design Sprint, PMs can ensure their products solve the right problems and deliver value to both users and the business. Whether you’re just starting out or refining your discovery process, these tools will help you navigate product development with confidence.
The Evolution of the Product Roadmap
In the last 100 years, there has been significant change in product management roles, from the first brand men at Proctor & Gamble to what we now know, as a modern product management role. At the same time, it is also important to reflect on the history and evolution of product roadmaps; a key tool in the product management toolkit. Over time, roadmaps have transformed from rigid, feature-focused timelines into more dynamic and outcome-driven strategic tools. So let's take a walk down memory lane.
The Early Days: Feature-Based and Timed Roadmaps
In the early days, roadmaps were primarily feature-based and timed. These roadmaps resembled Gantt charts, offering a visual timeline of when features were expected to be delivered. The concept of the "Golden Feature" roadmap also emerged shortly after, focusing on a single, high-impact feature that the release would be built on to drive the product’s success. While these provided a sense of control, they were often fraught with missed deadlines and scope creep. The reliance on estimated timelines made them inflexible, leading to a cycle of constant adjustments and buffer additions.
The Shift: Themed & Dual-Track Roadmaps
As the limitations of feature-based and timed roadmaps became evident, product managers began experimenting with alternative formats and themed roadmaps shifted focus from specific features to broader themes or objectives that were important to achieve. These new formats allowed for greater flexibility and alignment with strategic goals, paving the way for more adaptive and meaningful planning. Meanwhile, dual-track roadmaps introduced the idea of parallel work-streams; one focused on discovery and the other on delivery. This approach recognized the need for continuous learning and adaptation, allowing teams to pivot based on new insights. It also offered visibility into what was happening design, discovery & research.
The Rise of Outcome-Based Roadmaps
The most significant evolution in roadmapping has been the shift to outcome-based roadmaps around 2007. These roadmaps prioritize the results that a product aims to achieve rather than the specific features to be developed. The focus is on the "why" rather than the "what," aligning product efforts with broader business objectives.
Understanding the Three Types of Outcomes
Outcome-based roadmaps are built around three key types of outcomes: business outcomes, product outcomes, and user outcomes. Each plays a crucial role in guiding product strategy and execution.
- Business Outcomes: These are the high-level objectives that align with the organization's strategic goals, such as increasing revenue, expanding market share, or reducing costs. Business outcomes provide the overarching direction for the product team and would normally sit in an organisational level strategy. All business units, such as marketing, product, operations, etc, would be delivering on those business outcomes.
- Product Outcomes: These are the specific results that the product team aims to achieve, and has direct control over. Things like improving product quality, enhancing user engagement, or increasing feature adoption. Product outcomes are directly tied to the product’s success and contribute to the achievement of business outcomes.
- User Outcomes: These focus on the impact that the product has on its users, such as solving a problem, improving productivity, or delivering a delightful experience. User outcomes are the foundation of a successful product, as they directly influence product and business outcomes.
You want to make sure that you are focusing on all three, not just business outcomes. Remember Wells Fargo? Wells Fargo, one of the largest banks in the United States, became embroiled in a major scandal due to its intense focus on business outcomes, specifically revenue growth and shareholder value. In the early 2000s, the bank implemented aggressive sales goals, pressuring employees to meet unrealistic targets. This relentless pursuit of business outcomes led to widespread unethical practices, including the creation of millions of unauthorized customer accounts to meet sales quotas. By prioritizing business outcomes above all else, Wells Fargo neglected critical user and product outcomes. The bank failed to consider the impact of its actions on customers, leading to significant harm, loss of trust, and legal repercussions. The scandal exposed the dangers of focusing solely on business outcomes without balancing them with product and user outcomes. Had Wells Fargo also prioritized user outcomes, such as customer satisfaction and trust, alongside product outcomes like transparency and ethical practices, the bank might have avoided the widespread fraud and its devastating consequences. This case highlights the importance of a balanced approach, where business outcomes are pursued in conjunction with product and user outcomes, ensuring long-term success and sustainability.
The Interrelationship Between Outcomes
These three types of outcomes are interrelated. User outcomes drive product outcomes, which in turn contribute to business outcomes. For example, by delivering a feature that enhances user productivity (user outcome), you can increase user engagement (product outcome), ultimately leading to higher customer retention and revenue growth (business outcome). A critical first step is defining clear outcomes before deciding on features or solutions and once you do, then the team should continuously test and validate their assumptions, ensuring that every effort is aligned with achieving meaningful outcomes.
The Modern Roadmap: A Strategic Tool
Today’s roadmaps have evolved into strategic tools that align the efforts of cross-functional teams with the overall vision of the organization. They are no longer just lists of features or timelines but are living documents that guide decision-making, prioritize outcomes and contextualize discovery. The evolution of product roadmaps reflects the growing complexity and sophistication of the product management field. From feature-based timelines to outcome-driven strategies, roadmaps have become more than just planning tools—they are essential to driving product success. By focusing on business, product, and user outcomes, product managers can ensure that their efforts are aligned with the broader goals of the organization, leading to sustained success and growth.
What is a Strategic Goal?
A strategic goal is a specific, measurable objective that helps you achieve your vision. It serves as a clear target, guiding your efforts and resources towards impactful outcomes. Strategic goals are the building blocks of your broader product strategy, ensuring that every initiative contributes to the larger organizational objectives.
What Makes a Good Strategy?
A good strategy is one that is aligned with your vision, achievable, and grounded in thorough analysis. It should address key challenges, leverage strengths, and capitalize on opportunities. According to Rumelt "a good strategy honestly acknowledges the challenges being faced and provides an approach to overcoming them". A solid strategy must also be adaptable, allowing for flexibility in response to changing circumstances. However, the true essence of a good strategy lies in its focus and simplicity. This brings us to the critical importance of choosing only a few strategic goals.
Prioritizing Strategic Goals
It's tempting to chase multiple goals and sometimes, you could be working for an organisation that is not very strategic, in fact they are just reactive and say yes to everything. That's a difficult situation for sure. We know that the most effective organisations and strategies are those that concentrate on some key priorities. At Netflix we always worked to narrow it down to no more than 3 key goals. This focus ensures that your team’s efforts are directed towards what truly matters, rather than being diluted across numerous initiatives. If you say yes to everything, than NOTHING is a priority and you will attempt do a lot, but usually with half the quality and possibly not deliver anything significant. For government agencies or large organizations, I would say you can increase this number to 5, but no more; primarily because they need to deliver a lot of services, transactions and products to citizens, residents, agencies and businesses. Why is it crucial to choose? By trying to do everything it often leads to accomplishing nothing; too much work in progress means high switching costs and a reduction of quality and efficacy. Limited resources, time, and attention are better spent on a few high-impact goals that can drive significant progress. This concentrated effort allows for deeper analysis, more robust planning, and ultimately, more successful execution. So choose well!
How Product Strategy Delivers on an Organization’s Strategy
A well-crafted product strategy acts as the bridge between your strategic goals and the execution of your organization’s broader vision and sits between your product vision and roadmap. It translates high-level objectives into actionable steps, ensuring that every release, and product decision aligns with the overarching organisational strategy that delivers value to the customer, for the product & hence the business. The product strategy is one of the most important product management assets that you and your team create. For example, if an organization's strategic goal is to increase the number of users by launching in new international markets; then the product strategy might focus on localisation strategies such as translating into a number of other languages, language/region account settings, refactoring the code for unicode 32 characters, etc and your launch plans would be into the market release plans. The product strategy ensures that the product team’s efforts are not just about building a product but about building a product that drives the organization towards its strategic destination. It helps you to identify the following things:
- Who is the product for?
- What kind of product is it and what makes it stand out?
- Who are the users and, if appropriate, who are the customers?
- Why would people choose it over alternatives?
- What are the business goals?
- Which benefits does the product create for the company developing and providing it?
- Why would people want to use and buy it?
- What specific problem does it address, or which tangible benefit does it offer?
- How does it differ from competing offerings?
Without a product strategy, you will struggle to explain how your product creates value and find it difficult to come up with a realistic roadmap and therefore hard to execute on. Remember, your strategy always needs testing and validation against choices and risk. It is never once and done, you will learn more as you go, so be prepared to iterate on it, as a strategy is changeable and dynamic. As new technologies emerge, as competitors offer new products or update existing ones, as you enter new markets and as users’ needs evolve, your strategy has to change in order to proactively guide the product towards success. Check in on your environmental analysis (tech, competitors, industry trends, the organisation, current problems and tech adoption trends)
The Critical Role of Debate in Strategy Sessions
The process of defining strategic goals should never be a solitary task for the product manager. Instead, it should be a collaborative effort that involves robust debate with your team and key stakeholders. This debate is the critical component that allows you to identify the best strategic goals. You can't find a strategy in a monologue, it requires that dialogue back and forth, debating about what others see as the critical issues, opportunities, trends and pain points that should be solved or leveraged. This is dependent on the environmental analysis (mentioned in previous blog) that you have done as the basis for the debate.
During these discussions, different perspectives come into play, uncovering blind spots and surfacing innovative ideas. The debate helps in stress-testing the goals ensuring they are not only ambitious but also realistic and aligned with the team and organization’s capabilities. By engaging the team in this way, you foster a sense of ownership and commitment to the strategy, which is vital for successful execution. I can't stress this part enough; bringing your team into the product strategy conversation is critical and leads to a more robust strategy.
Measuring Success: Metrics, Goals, Targets, OKRs, and KPIs
Once strategic goals are set, measuring progress becomes essential. This is where metrics, goals, targets, OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) come into play. I don't want to go into too much depth around these right now, knowing that different organisations, leaders and product managers choose to do different things. What's critical to understand for now is that your strategy should be measurable and your strategic goals sit a level up from things such as OKR's. I will do a deeper dive into these options at a later date.
- Metrics: These are the quantifiable measures that indicate progress towards your goals. Metrics should be specific, relevant, and easy to track.
- Targets: Targets are the specific milestones that indicate progress towards your goals. Setting clear targets helps in keeping the team focused and motivated.
- KPIs: KPIs are the critical indicators of success that you monitor regularly. They provide ongoing insight into whether your strategy is on track.
- OKRs: OKRs are a popular framework for setting and tracking objectives and their outcomes. The objective is a clear, time-bound goal, and the key results are measurable outcomes that define success.
However, by setting up the right metrics and regularly reviewing them, you ensure that your strategy is not just a plan on paper but a living, evolving framework that guides your team to success.
How It Shapes Your Roadmap
Your next step is executing on your strategic plan and your strategic goals provide a clear focus for your roadmap if you are still using one in your organisation. They will help you determine priorities, flesh out the details of initiatives that need to happen, help you to say no to new things, guide resource allocation, and set the direction for initiatives and projects. A well-defined roadmap should ONLY have what is relevant to the strategic goals and ensures that every action taken aligns with those strategic goals. This alignment is crucial for maintaining momentum and ensuring that the product development process stays on track to deliver on the strategic goals. If you don't use a roadmap, at this point, you might have some outcomes to work with. These outcomes should encompass business outcomes, product specific outcomes and customer outcomes. Your product and customer outcomes would help you to deliver on the business outcomes. The product outcomes would also help you to identify pain points, problems and opportunities that you and the team can focus your discovery work on.
Conclusion
In summary, a product strategy that delivers on an organization's strategy is one that is focused, debated, and measurable. By choosing a few key strategic goals, engaging in team debates to refine them, and setting up the right measurement frameworks for your organisation, you can ensure that your product strategy is not just a set of aspirations but is also something you can execute on, to achieve your vision.
