Value Of Vision Alignment
By: Harsh Vardhan
Tags: Technology, Innovation, Startup, Product Management, Leadership

Value Of Vision Alignment

Aligning product features to the organizational vision helps achieve outcomes and results in win-win for everyone.

Few years back, I was responsible for the annual planning activities of all the product portfolios of a company with a budget of around $100M. The goal was to first select a tool for the planning activities. Later collaborate with all the portfolio leaders and build the roadmap. We very quickly selected a tool and scheduled roadmap planning sessions. We were all committed to the job, collaborated extremely well, and built the roadmap on time as originally planned. However, when we presented the roadmap to the executive team, it didn’t go well. There were a ton of questions that resulted into hundreds of hours of rework. Reason? We put a lot of glory details into the roadmap but the elements that would show the alignment with the overall organizational vision and strategies were missing. They were either not clear or not thought through at all while building the roadmap.

A study from PwC shows that 54% of executives struggle to align product innovation with the business strategy. Part of the reason is — not adequately socializing the importance of vision and strategy throughout the organization. This produces a lot of outputs not desired by the customer and so waste in the process.

The focus of this article is to demonstrate steps that are needed to align the product features to the organizational vision in order to achieve customer desired outcomes. We will take a top down approach — start with the top-level organizational vision and navigate all the way down to the product user story level. Goal is to demonstrate the value of vision alignment while very lightly touching upon the product development process.

Step # 1: Organizational Vision

“Dreams are not those which you see in sleep. Dreams are those which does not let you sleep.” — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

A vision is like a dream that doesn’t let the dreamer sleep. If this happens, an organization is formed. Vision sets the direction of the organization. It’s the step number one in the value chain that describes what organization is trying to achieve in the future.

Success of an organization in the long term not only depends upon how great the vision is but also how well it is understood by everyone in the organization.

Image Credit: Gramdand

Step # 2: Organizational Mission

Mission comes after vision in the organizational hierarchy. If vision is ‘where’ you are heading, mission is ‘what’ role you play to reach there.

“I had a dream that people could fly (vision) I want to give them the wheels to try” (mission)

In the absence of the mission, there is no guiding principle/clarity on what the organization does, which makes the organization a short-term money-making machine.

Step # 3: Business Strategy

Next comes the business strategy. Strategy helps succeed in the mission.

Image Credit: CartoonStock

If hill is the vision in the above image and heading towards the hill is the mission, where is the strategy?

Strategy is all about putting the rules to win in the mission. Strategy (how) helps to succeed in the mission (what) to reach the vision (where).

“I know the role I am in (mission) But I need to know the rules to win” (strategy)

Step # 4: Organizational Objectives

Next in the chain is the organizational objectives. Objectives provide clarity on the specific activities that need to be performed as part of the mission/role.

Image Credit: CartoonStock

Objectives should never be unknown. They need to be clear and SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound). They are also called organizational goals.

“I want to set some goals (objectives) To let everyone know What I am going to do in my role” (mission)

Step # 5: Product Initiatives

Once the organizational objectives are created by the executives, it’s time for their leadership team to launch various product initiatives.

“It’s time to meet my leadership team They will build what I dreamed”

Product initiatives are the actual steps that the leadership team needs to take to accomplish the goals. They are created in alignment with the organizational objectives.

Image Credit: CartoonStock

Step # 6: Product Features

“Where are the commanders of the teams? Bring them on to the dream”

Product features are next in the hierarchy and there you go product managers.

Product managers break the product initiatives into smaller features (tangible or intangible benefits) while talking to the customers (outside-in product development). Desirability and feasibility analysis are performed in collaboration with user experience/design and technology leads.

Aligning features to the product initiatives and finally to the overall vision provides guidance on its appropriateness. This eliminates waste in the process and avoids situations like below.

Image Credit: Marketoonist

Step # 7: Product User Stories

Finally comes the entire team who is so eagerly waiting to build. As they say —

“We got a lot to chew Let’s begin to do”

Team breaks down the features into smaller chunks that are called user stories and put them into a product backlog in a prioritized order. Team get them all, few at a time, in time-boxed increments, called a sprint or iteration. One of the team ceremonies are shown in the below diagram.

Image Credit: Slideshare

User stories should be well written in collaboration with the team so as to avoid any late surprises like the one shown in the below diagram. Product manager/owner puts together a card with high level details about the user story, engage in a conversation with the team and team commits to it after they agree on all the details — 3 C’s of a user story.

Image Cartoon: Hackernook

Finally, The Results

Aligning every work item to the organizational vision resulted in —

“We got the wheels done It was so much of a fun We saw the people fly That made us all cry”