When Product Vision and Gardening Collide

Not a day goes by without a Product blog or LinkedIn post mentioning a vital part of the Product Craft that many are missing. Everything from customer discovery to how you deal with stakeholders and that all-important collaboration with Engineering counterparts to deliver.

But I think one aspect that isn’t talked about enough is the need for a bold vision for the product or feature you’ve decided to pursue. A vision that will lead yourself and your team to deliver amazing value and increase user adoption. While it sounds simple enough, having a bold product vision is an easy thing to underestimate on the grand scale of things as you and your team busy themselves with ceremonies, stakeholder management and getting on with the job.

And honestly, how important is a bold Product Vision anyway?

I wager that apart from your initial Hypothesis to kick things off, its probably the second most important grouping of words you’ll use throughout the lifecycle of turning your Hypothesis into that tangible value your customers are seeking to solve their problems. And as a Product Manager, its the statement you’ll refer back to countless times as you seek to keep the roadmap on track throughout the various course corrections you must take to deliver that value.

Having a firm grip of the basic foundations of Product Management has always been my go to play when things get rough and tough in the trenches; often times when activities are derailed by misunderstanding, poor communication and favoring the tactical over the strategic.

And its times like these when Product Managers need to reiterate the Production Vision, the collective direction of where we are going as a team, what we are producing to solve problems for our customers and what are the important things we need to focus on.

In my opinion; Slack has an excellent vision statement that resonates strongly with what they are trying to achieve;

While it might not always seem like Slack is achieving these things all the time, its their ambition to do so. To make their product a simple thing to use, to help automate tasks that can turn work from unpleasant to pleasant and ultimately help their customers to be more productive then not using Slack.

Besides the “Product Name” and “What kind of product” you are developing the most important elements of a vision statement are the “Who” and the “Why”.

But an even simpler example of having a simple vision is gardening.
Yes, that type of gardening.

I recently decided that what we need on the East side of our house is a flowerbed. Not just any flower bed but one that we could plant lemon trees as well as vegetables and all other manner of plants that take our fancy at the local garden center.
I pitched the idea and got approval from my primary stakeholder to begin the dig; my pitch even included diagrams and statements of how lovely it would look from the lounge windows.

Pitch completed, I then enrolled my son to help with the dig but I had forgotten something quite important. I forget to actually tell him the vision I had for the flower bed.
And this only came to light shortly after I had marked out the area to dig. In his mind we were setting out to dig a 2 x 2 meter patch of lawn and be done by brunch time; not the 10 x 2 meter vision I had pitched before to my stakeholder. This, of course, caused some frustration but was soon forgotten when I grabbed the water blaster to help loosen the soil which became my son’s primary job.

The water blaster was so much fun that my son forgot about what we were trying to achieve, resulting in the question mostly all parents dread;

And this is where I pointed to the markings on the lawn, again, and reiterated the vision for completing the flowerbed. This was repeated a few times as we labored through the day but in the end, a 10 x 2 meter flowerbed was dug, plants where planted and the stakeholder was happy.

As I tossed the last bit of soil I couldn’t help thinking that in the space of a day I had experienced the ups and downs of trying to deliver value as a Product Manager; albeit muddier and with less weeping.

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