Why Product Managers should care Product Vision & Strategy?
As a Product Manager, creating a product vision and product strategy for your product is one of the hardest challenges. A vision provides motivation to the team while a strategy guides them in the right direction. They help in prioritising what is the right thing to do for the product and facilitate effective collaboration. Just to be clear, both of them are not a list of features, user stories, bugs or ideas (which is covered in product roadmap and product backlog).
So what exactly is a product vision?...
A product vision describes the very purpose of why we are creating a product i.e the future state of the product that as a Product Manager desires to achieve.
A product vision should be a clear and powerful sentence. Example vision statement of some famous companies
- Microsoft - A computer on every desk and in every home
- Amazon - To be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online.
- Ikea - To create a better everyday life for the many people.
There are many templates available on the internet to define and phrase a product vision, but I’d like to share one of my favourite vision statement template:
When - At a time when_______
What - our product is the only_______
How - that_______
Who - for_______
Where - in/from_______
Why - who_______
Remember that a product vision is not the same as a company vision. A big company like Microsoft, which is a multi-product company, will have a vision for each of its products like Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Skype, etc. However, each product vision would be connected to the overall Microsoft’s company vision. In a start-up or single product start-up or company, the product vision is usually the company vision.
A product vision helps build and define product strategy, product roadmap and backlog. You cannot create a product strategy without defining a product vision.
What is Product Strategy?
Product strategy is a plan or path you take to achieve your vision. It is the basic planning of all the tasks that you need to complete to achieve the product’s ultimate destination and gives the right direction of where your product should be heading.
It is the foundation of the entire product lifecycle and guides the team on what value the product brings to the customers, how the product solves user problems and how the value being generated creates a sustainable product market fit. It is not a product roadmap but helps build the roadmap.
A product strategy has 4 core elements:
- Target Audience - Which market or target audience you want your product to service. Who are going to be benefited by using your product i.e who are your users or customers
- Market Needs - What customer problem does your product solve or what benefit it offers to customers. Why will customers want to use your product?
- Product Differentiators - What makes your product unique or what is its unique selling proposition.
- Business Goals - What business goals you want to achieve and how will the product help achieve them - increase revenue, sales, minimize cost, increase conversions from trial to paid version etc. Ex: Generate £10 million revenue within 6 months.
According to Roman Pichler, a simple tool to capture and describe both the product vision and the product strategy is the Product Vision Board.
What is a Product Roadmap?
In simplest words, a product roadmap is a plan of action for how a product or solution will evolve over time. It’s used to outline future product functionality and when new features will be released. It not only provides crucial context for the team's everyday work, but also ensures that the work is aligned towards the higher level business strategy.
You can read more on it in my article Product Roadmap
What is a Product Backlog?
Derived from the Product Roadmap, a Product Backlog is a prioritised list of work critical to product development. It includes new features, changes to existing features, bug fixes, infrastructure changes, wireframes, workflow diagrams, use cases, non-functional requirements or other activities needed for the product. The work is usually described in epics, user stories or tasks.
It is like a to-do list for the product and the team won't do things which are not listed on the product backlog. The items within the backlog are prioritized by the business value and risk, with the most important ones on top and the lesser significant ones below. The high priority items are more fine grained and defined more in detail, compared to the items at the bottom which are more coarse grained.
You can read more on it in my article Product Backlog
Conclusion
As a Product Manager, it's best to understand your company’s product vision. If there is no existing vision for your product, go ahead and create one and involve your key stakeholders when doing so. It takes considerable effort to create a vision statement and should be referred to constantly throughout the product development. Remember that a vision not only gives direction by providing a larger purpose of what is being built, but also helps take key decisions for your product!