The practice
A product vision is one of those things that everybody wants to have, but few are good at. The vision is one of those thinking challenges that so often defeats us. Here’s my take on how to make finding the vision slightly more doable.
By product vision I mean the description of the product future state. In that state, customers are happy, the business is good, and so on. The vision can be a narrative statement of few paragraphs. Sometimes pictures tell more than a thousand words. A video can also tell the story.
But nonetheless, the vision is about the future. That future of what might be.
You cannot just think through the vision
Our brains do not create whole narratives of customers benefitting from our product at once. Our brains constantly jump between flashes of possible moments in the future. At least in my head, those stories do not have clear start and an end. The story starts somewhere mid way. Then that scene just ends. The timeline also just jumps out of sequence. I may go back to the beginning and think more. Then my brain all of a sudden jumps to another actor in the narrative. It is abrupt, partial and messy.
Vision never arrives as ready. Our brains give us unfinished perspectives from here and there. We hold the thought and as soon as we find the pen, a lot has already been lost in the working memory. Then we focus our mind again, we see something else. Maybe again another actor of the story now. Then all of a sudden our brain starts to worry about the state of affairs today. What I’m trying to get to is that the brain is not an automation.
I wish we could just create a storyline and be done with it. I tell myself to dream on.
Our mind is also very creative and chatty. It gives us ideas all the time. You have to somehow get your brain focused on the possible future, but then the floodgates usually do open. You have too many ideas, perspectives and too many possible scenes from future. It could be this. It could be that. And then you think of the third.
You cannot hold all this in your head all the time. You simply lack the working memory and context window (AI pun intended).
This all means that you need a method for constructing the vision from those pieces you start to see in your brain.
Visioning is a process - use it to generate and increment
Write what you thought down. This is the first step and the elementary step.
Write what you thought down even if it is not the exact right thing. You will not know instantly what is right or wrong. Firstly, you do not know of the future what will eventually happen. Secondly, this raw material what you use to build the house of the vision. The thoughts are the lego bricks. The house is the vision. The more you have legos, the more novel house you can build.
Try these
Crazy eights (See design sprint)
Service roleplay (Just google for it and try it with colleaques)
Gather material. Recombine the material. Find something that you think might bring a smile on the face of the customer. Recombine the selected scenes, and parts of the vision. Make into something whole. Maybe a paragraph of text. Maybe a small picture of what it could be.
Test to build
Once you have something written out, test the vision without shame. Show what you made to someone who cares. Tell the storyline of the vision. Show the illustration if you have it. Then listen and observe. If you are onto something then the person engages. You see the body language. Then you can simply ask: what is missing? Also ask: what’s wrong here?
Listen to what the people say. They tell you parts of the vision. Just remember. They cannot express the vision any clearer than you. Follow the hints. Try see behind their comments. Make educated guesses. This is all adding to your base material.
Then redo a small part of the narrative or the picture.
Then show to the next person. Rinse and repeat. You are onto something if every time you tell the story then the listeners become more engaged. Hey, this means the vision is starting to form.
Know your customers before visioning for them
Visioning is about the customers. The best framing for vision is telling a story about the experience your customer have in the future. For a cafe, the vision might be about the feeling a good cup of coffee brings. The calmness but still being awake. Tell the functional, but bring forward the feeling, the gains and the so what.
Don’t get caught up in explaining future inner workings of your solution. Vision is not about the greatness of our software or any other inner workings of the product. Resist the temptation to start detailing that out. All of that is a detour that just does not enrich the vision.
Vision is also not a mission. It is not about our activities while we help customers. There might be just a bit of our company actions in the story - but only to the extent that they progress the story of the customer. Vsion is also not about the greatness and success of our company. You can try vision as the nice future state of your own company. You will notice that just will beg the question that “what are we really creating?”. The company success is a byproduct of winning over the customers.
So: resist the urges. Always go back to customers for vision.
Try these
Talk to potential future (and current) customers
Write down the “jobs to be done” that they are experiencing in their life
Collect the material. Have too much. Recombine the pieces like legos again. Refine the detail.
Strategy, choice and vision go together
Strategy is the third big enabler of vision.
Anything can be dreamed up. Too many things will appear as plausible and good. The trick is knowing what will be competitive. It is about having the sense of what has better likelihood of winning. It is about iterating to something more unique.
Strategy is making choices on how you are different and better as perceived by the customer. You choose a small number of outcomes for the customer and you choose to do better than anyone else. Of course, you can take the path of cost leadership but most of us don’t want to go there.
Your raw material has lots of outcomes. Customers have been happy. Good things have happened for them. Now it is time to narrow down.
Do the tentative choosing. Are we going to be the coffee house for ambience? Or or shall we somehow try and capture the aroma of the coffee better than all the other alternatives. Make a choice if your intuition tell you that some outcome would be interesting. Try it out. Redo the narrative so that this outcome stand out.
Now you have a vision with a strategic option inbuilt to it.
Test the vision again. It may be that you got is right. More likely, you did not succeed on the first try. The important bit is the listening. Take in all the information on what people say is good about the outcome. But also be very keen to notice that not everyone engages. Then ask what about this vision is not yet right.
The strategy helps you narrow down your focus. You can start to converge your raw material into something that has a backbone. Actually you can say the strategy is the backbone. The strategy happens when you find something that cuts though all your raw material removing the unnecessary.
But remember that all the initial steps of collecting the raw material are essential. You seldom, if ever, can jump directly into strategy. You simply cannot see it without the stepping stones of initial versions of the storyline. Strategy, like vision, is a search for something that could work.
Visioning is a muscle - use it to generate and increment
Visioning can certainly be learned. Any cognitive action can be improved and perfected over time. I’ve found it to be similar to mathematics. The basic theory allows you to apply. The application forms neural links in your brain. The though patterns become more easy to fire up. The thought becomes more natural. You astray less. Your brain is life a muscle. Exercise makes is stronger.
The thing about learning is that you have to go though the initial phase of incompetence. You will feel like you do know how to do it. Usually that is the exact case. As with other stuff, it turns out we can learn. Then the practise becomes a choice of taking the time.
I hope you some day do set aside the time to tell the rich story of the customer.
Customer orientation and doing anything at work can be a habit. Then you have done that action that has become habitual so many times. You no longer think about it consciously - it just happens. I can say that I’m not fully yet there.
What I can say that customer orientation pays off big time. I hope you do not shy away from trying to form visions.