A Vision You Can Say No With

Part three of the product owner toolbox. In the previous part every backlog item ended up hanging from a vision. Now we need one.

A product vision describes in a short statement why a product exists, who it’s for and what makes it better than the alternatives. It’s long-term. It guides everyone who works on the product and gives them something to check their work against. Every backlog item, at any level, should move the product towards it.

Most visions I’ve read fail at this because they’re written to please everyone. “The best experience for all our customers” doesn’t exclude anything. A vision that doesn’t exclude anything can’t help you decide.

The template

Geoffrey Moore’s template from Crossing the Chasm is still the best I know, because it forces you to name a target group and a competitor:

For (target customers) who (their need) the (product name) is a (product category) that (key benefit) Unlike (the alternative) our product (key difference)

The leave tool’s vision

For employees and team leads in companies that still plan absences in spreadsheets who need to know who is away and how many days they have left, the leave tool is an internal web app that turns a request into an approved, visible absence in under a minute. Unlike the Excel file and the email chain, it is the single place where employees, team leads and HR see the same data.

Read it again and look at what it rules out:

• Payroll. HR will ask for it. It’s a different product.
• Overtime and time tracking. Related, and a request that will come up in the first demo. Not this product.
• A native app. “Under a minute” works in a mobile browser.
• Pleasing HR first. The target group is employees and team leads. HR benefits when they stop sending emails.

Every one of these will come up as a request. The vision lets you answer with a sentence everyone has already agreed to, instead of with your personal opinion.

If you do want to change the vision, change it openly. Don’t let it drift one exception at a time.

Write it early, write it together

Write the vision at the start, before the first epic. Bring in everyone with a stake in it: HR, finance, a few team leads, the people who keep the current spreadsheet alive and, of course, the team. They don’t need to write it with you. What matters is that they stand behind it.

That consensus is the point. The vision draws the boundary of the product and limits the room to manoeuvre. If the stakeholders haven’t agreed to the boundary, they’ll treat every boundary you defend as a personal decision by you.

A clear vision also helps outside the team. It explains the value from the user’s point of view and says plainly how the product differs from the alternatives. For an internal tool, the alternative usually isn’t a competitor. It’s the spreadsheet, or doing nothing.

How to use it

Print it. Put it in the backlog tool, the README and the first slide of every review. When a new epic comes in, read the vision first and then decide whether the epic fits.

Next

With a vision in place, the next level down is the epic. I’ll argue that an epic is a bet, and that a bet without a stop condition isn’t a bet, it’s a commitment.