Why your vision may be killing your product (and what to do instead)

A broad and aspirational vision can be a barrier to building a great product. I know that goes against everything you’ve learnt, so let’s look at examples to investigate this practically blasphemous statement. 

Global aerospace organization Boeing has a vision that matches conventional wisdom, i.e., that a good vision is broad, aspirational, and everlasting: “We aspire to be the best in aerospace and an enduring global industrial champion.” But such a vision is also useless. It offers zero clarity on what problem the organization is setting out to solve, and as a result, it doesn’t create alignment across the organization. 

What does being the best in aerospace even mean? Perhaps it meant maximizing market capitalization? Boeing invested $43 billion in share buybacks over the span of roughly six years (funds that, in retrospect, would have been better spent on innovating a new narrow-body plane from scratch). To put these figures in perspective, consider that to build the Dreamliner from scratch, Boeing invested $32 billion over eight years. 

Or perhaps being the best in aerospace meant growing revenues? Boeing optimized for revenues by creating the 737 Max to compete with Airbus. The 737 Max ended up being a frankenstein of a product created by placing a larger engine on a decades-old frame which resulted in aerodynamic instability. The company applied a Band-Aid fix in the form of a software workaround which ultimately led to two crashes that killed 346 people.

Boeing’s vision of being the leader in aerospace has been meaningless because when you don’t have a clear vision for the long-term, your short-term business needs dominate your decision-making. In this case, Boeing had caught the product disease I call Obsessive Sales Disorder – it happens when you continue to pursue short-term gains at the expense of the long-term. 

For companies, the lack of a clear vision leads to myopic decisions and the pursuit of short-term results. For individuals, the lack of a clear vision means your role is often stuck in a tactical and reactive role. 

As a product leader or an individual contributor, you can check if you’re experiencing any of these symptoms – if you are, it’s time to create and communicate a more detailed vision: 

These symptoms happen because a high-level vision statement of “being the leader in XYZ” or “democratizing ABC” is hard to disagree with but it also masks the misalignments that lurk beneath. To take on a more strategic role, you need to craft a detailed vision and help your team translate the vision into action systematically.

What makes a good vision, and how do you use it?

A good vision helps you create alignment on the key questions surrounding your product: 

It helps you answer the who, what, why, when, and how questions. But I’ve found that even when you know that you have to answer these questions, starting with a blank sheet of paper is counterproductive! It leads to a wordsmithing exercise which is pointless. You need to focus on the concepts, not the words. 

This is why in the Radical Product Thinking (RPT) way, you write a Radical Vision Statement – a fill-in-the-blanks statement that lets you answer these profound questions for your product. Most importantly, creating alignment on these answers forms the basis for how your team translates your shared vision into action. 

RPT gives you a systematic process for translating a vision for change into your everyday activities through its five elements (Vision, Strategy, Prioritization, Execution & measurement, and Culture). Once you have a good vision, you need to translate it into an actionable plan or product strategy and then translate it into everyday decision-making and prioritization. You can then translate your vision and strategy into hypothesis-driven execution – it means deriving metrics that are relevant for your vision and strategy rather than measuring what’s popular. And finally, Culture is the last element of RPT that helps you engineer the culture your team needs to innovate smarter. Just as you observed above, a radical vision is different from what’s traditionally taught about a good vision, each of these elements challenges conventional wisdom where needed. 

Furthermore, these elements don’t force a linear process for product development – in fact, you should expect to revisit your vision or strategy as you execute. But as the picture illustrates below, development looks chaotic without the clarity offered by each element!

How do you write a Radical Vision Statement and translate it into action?

I often work with organizations and leadership teams to facilitate visioning sessions to create cross-functional alignment. And I’ve seen the value in having product managers use this approach with their teams too and wanted to make it easier for product managers to learn to create detailed vision statements and create alignment within their teams. 

So I’m thrilled to introduce the free Radical Product Thinking (RPT) Vision Setting course created in partnership with Mind The Product and Pendo. The course helps you create a good vision and introduces you to the five elements of RPT. It’s also the first step to getting Radical Product Thinking Certification. 

In the vision setting course, you’ll learn how to diagnose common product diseases that make good products go bad. You’ll then learn how to avoid these by crafting a detailed vision and how to get buy-in on the vision from your team. You’ll also learn how to get buy-in for rethinking your vision because sometimes directly challenging the existing vision may be unwelcome and counterproductive. Lastly, you’ll also learn from others’ experiences as leaders and individual contributors on how the Radical Vision Statement helped them level up. 

After the free Vision Setting course, you can take the live workshops to master the rest of the elements of RPT (Strategy, Prioritization, Measurement, and Culture), so you can systematically translate that vision into action. And once you earn all 5 badges, you’ll have your RPT certification! 

Conclusion

Introduce a new way of thinking about products in your organization so that you can scale your leadership, create alignment, and take on a more strategic role. This can help give others the same context on what it means to have a clear vision and why it’s important. 

You can share the Vision Setting course so you can build a shared vision and have a common vocabulary. You can also sign up for the RPT Certification courses so that you can learn as a team how you can use your vision to translate it into your everyday activities. 

Radhika is a keynote speaker at #mtpcon North America this October in Raleigh, NC. Radhika's keynote is titled 'Overcoming (and preventing) the most common product diseases'.

Don't miss out on this opportunity to learn from product leaders - buy your ticket!