The first step in creating a digital product: building a coherent product vision.
Building a successful product is a difficult thing. The product must both bring real value to its users and be of impeccable quality. In other words, the motto of a Product Manager could be "do the right product and do it right".
The introduction of agile practices in IT departments has done much to improve product quality. However, agility is still finding it hard to get through the door of so-called "business" departments. The latter tend to see agile as a means of developing all their ideas, while allowing themselves to constantly change objectives and opinions.
Being agile doesn't mean that every idea has to be realized just because it's possible to do so. The consequence of this approach is that development teams work on a succession of projects that sometimes lack business coherence and the ability to project themselves... in other words: working without a product vision!
Companies have made considerable progress in "doing it right", but it's still necessary to make the right product: one that arouses the enthusiasm of existing users and enables the conquest of new ones. To give yourself every chance of success, you therefore need to work on your "product vision"!
What Is a Product Vision?
The product vision is the ideal world imagined for our users in the medium term (2 to 5 years). Future-oriented and user-centric, it enables stakeholders to be aligned with the product's purpose, defining its success for users and their environment. It should be noted that the term product vision is not specific to agility. All projects and products must have a clear vision, whatever the methodological frameworks used to achieve it.
The product vision is the answer to the following questions:
- What problem are we trying to solve?
- For whom are we solving this problem?
- What solution are we bringing to this problem?
- How are we going to launch this product (Go-To-Market)
- What is the business model?
- How will we measure the success of this product? (revenue, metrics)?
Having a clear product vision enables, among other things:
- To guarantee team motivation
- To anticipate technological choices based on this vision.
In an agile team, product vision is even more important than in a conventional team: before each sprint or before the development of each feature, team members must ask themselves whether their work meets the "Product Statement". If it doesn't, the energy isn't in the right place.
Working on your product vision: tools and methods
A Tool: the Lean Canvas
To synthesize your product vision, you can use an excellent tool suggested by Ash Maurya: the Lean Canvas.
The Lean Canvas is made up of two main areas: the left side focuses on the product, the right side on the marke
- User segment: Who will be the target of our product? Who are our potential early adopters?
- Problem: What are the top 3 problems we're looking to solve for us supposed early adopters.
- Unique value proposition:The value proposition is the reason your prospects should become users. How do you solve their problems?
- Solution: What are the 3 big features that will solve our early adopters' problems?
- Channel: What are the free and paid channels you can use to reach your future users?
- Metrics: What metrics will you measure to validate or invalidate your hypotheses? (NPS, AAARR, turnover)
- Costs: What are your fixed and variable costs?
- Revenue: What's the business model? How will you make money?
- Competitive advantages: What makes you better than others at dealing with the problems you've identified? (Technical knowledge, address book, brand)
It's important to note that the Lean Canvas is only a support for reflection. It can sometimes be tempting to fill it out in a four-hour work session and then take it at face value throughout the creation of the product. The Lean Canvas has the merit of giving a clear representation of a product's vision, but the main task is to iterate on this initial version to arrive at a Lean Canvas in which you have made the minimum of assumptions. Each box must therefore be the subject of specific work.
Formalizing Your Product Vision
The product vision can be characterized by a short, simple and effective sentence.
It can be defined in different forms such as:
- "we believe statement" : a statement outlining the company's general beliefs and aspirations
- "differentiation statement": a statement that outlines the qualities, features and advantages of a product, service or company over what competitors offer
Product Vision: How Much Time Should You Spend on It?
Investing time in creating a product vision is no absolute guarantee of making the right product. This vision will necessarily evolve over the life of the product.
Companies such as Twitter, PayPal, Pinterest and Groupon all pivoted several times before achieving the positioning we know today.
Pinterest, for example, was originally called "Tote" and enabled its users to browse the online stores of their favorite retailers and be notified when an item was available for sale. The founders realized that their users were more interested in building collections from their favorite items and then sharing them with their friends. It was this realization that prompted them to evolve their platform into the current version of Pinterest and its 70 million users.
Although it may change in the future, framing the vision well upstream remains the best way to minimize the risk of human and financial investment in the development a product that won't find its market.
The big question is: how much time should I spend on it? You could spend months trying to validate business hypotheses or do in-situ studies. Obviously, that wouldn't be reasonable. To properly calibrate this phase, you need to have orders of magnitude in mind: from experience, how long does it take to develop a product of the same type in my company? With my competitors?
As an example, we generally carry out this vision phase for about 1 month for products whose initial development time (before market launch) will be between 8 months and 1 year.
The Toolbox
We've already talked about the Lean Canvas, but there are many tools that are variants of it:
- Product Vision board
- Business Model Generation (businessmodelgeneration.com)
- Online tools: Leanstack
- Validation board
To find out more, download our book on Agile Product Management
