Establishing a Product Vision
By: Workday Design
Tags: Workshop Facilitation, Design Workshop, User Experience, Product Design, Design Collaboration

Planning a direction to go in the future demands imagination and wisdom. Whether it’s making a five-year plan for your career or deciding what to buy for dinner tonight, it becomes a decisive moment of honest evaluation. Where am I now? What path should I take in order to end up _______? Evaluation of the long-term goal often gets pushed to the side or becomes lost amongst the more tangible work that makes up our day-to-day. In terms of building a product, keeping the vision in sight at all times can be mentally taxing when you are in the weeds of completing increments of work. Product vision workshops can help to alleviate this issue because they produce a vision statement.

An authentic vision statement that is ever-present for the team creates a sense of ownership amongst team members. The vision statement should be short and sweet, conveying purpose in a snapshot. Creating a vision statement is like placing a flag on the horizon; it directs productivity and helps instill an understanding of collective purpose towards a successful product. Touching on experiences from our design team at Workday, I hope to help you kickstart the process of envisioning a clearer future for your product.

Prior Preparation Ensures Successful Performance

The need for a product vision workshop can come about in different forms, and some teams run these meetings regularly to constantly evolve their vision. For example, with team members in various locations and levels, misalignment on a product’s core purpose can arise. At Workday, a situation like this, combined with rapid growth, influenced the need for realignment on a particular product that I was working on.

Illustration by Kevin O’Sullivan. This image addresses the myth of the visionary within the tech industry.

Amongst many myths surrounding the technology industry is that of “the visionary,” a character wearing a black turtleneck and rimless spectacles who wakes at 4 AM with a crystal-clear vision of the future and how a product fits into it. However, the reality is very different; many hands make light work. With the right combination of imagination and wisdom in your product vision workshop, many minds can create the most accurate picture of the desired destination — so choose carefully who is in the room. With this destination in view, the same minds can begin navigating along the path to reach it.

It may not be possible to get all members of the team to attend vision sessions, so choose a group that ideally includes product management and lead representatives from Development and QA. Once you establish the product vision statement, you must share out the vision with all team members. The entire team should be invited to a second session unveiling the vision statement to provide visibility and inclusion for all. For our product vision workshop, a design lead owned the scheduling of activities to determine the flow and tempo of the story that needed to be told. However, this can be carried out by anyone with a in-depth knowledge of the product and team.

A Picture is Worth a 1,000 Words

Illustration by Kevin O’Sullivan. The vision board is an artifact created in the Product Vision Workshop.

The product vision board is the anchor of the entire workshop. A vision board helps the team understand the 4 pillars of a successful product before they establish the vision statement: the target group, user needs, business value, and the product. Use the vision board to take a look back: a key stakeholder in the team should recap the journey of the product and team so far. The vision workshop is a moment to reflect on past success, acknowledge the work that has been completed and see the impact that work has had on the product. This section thrives when it’s visual. A picture tells a 1000 stories, so this section should be full of graphs, meaningful data, illustrations of pain points and success stories, and maybe even some photographs of the team throughout the ages. The vision board itself can be digitally completed or drawn on a whiteboard — prepare a template before the workshop begins.

This portion gives everyone a full picture of the history of the product and team, and helps to instill pride in the work and understand the positivity of growth. Even if there is a mix of newer and more experienced members in the room, reminiscing bonds everyone and welcomes those who may be starting out on this product. It’s important to know the past to define the future.

Thinking Outside The Box

The next exercise should move from internally looking at progress to focusing on the impact the product has had on the world: what value has the product delivered, and who has used it and why? The product vision board comprehensively covers impact by examining the target user, their needs and the business need, and ultimately creating a picture of the product’s purpose for existing. The vision board is an artifact that can always be referenced by the team. At Workday, product managers and designers were able to drive this discussion based on the user knowledge they attained through customer engagement, feedback and research.

The last step in the vision board exercise is to establish the vision statement. To get the creative juices flowing amongst the group, it is nice to start with “the product in a box” exercise. The group must imagine the product as an item in a store. Given a blank packaging box, everyone gets involved designing how it should look; some people can lean towards the wording of catchy slogans, while others can flex their graphic skills by designing a logo. This exercise is about summarizing all the information collected about the product in a limited amount of space, and condensing the big idea so that it is easily communicated. Summarizing complex ideas is a great jumpstart into completing a first pass at the vision statement. Following the workshop, the product owner can revise the statement before it is distributed to the team and made ever-present in the product area.

It’s Just The Beginning…

Illustration by Kevin O’Sullivan. This illustration captures the teamwork that is needed when misalignment occurs in a team.

As a product continues to mature and evolve, the vision may change. But don’t let the vision become a desert mirage that disorients the team. The benefit of having a vision in the first place is guidance and motivation, but vision is not yet reality. In our team, once the product vision statement was established, the artifacts created in the workshop remained in the team’s seating area as a constant reminder of our goal. Even now, the vision has become the definition of why we come to work in the morning — the simple statement that we reply with when asked at the water cooler, “What are you working on?” or “What does your product do?”

Rather than having to reach into the mind’s eye, our vision exists in the space we work in and is at the forefront of every decision we make. If the vision becomes irrelevant, it is open to change, but having a team working towards a shared purpose is the first ingredient in the recipe for success. Stay aligned as a team with a vision and you will make it to your destination.