Building and Selling the Mission & Vision
Product Managers in Leadership positions are responsible for building and selling the vision for their products.
What is Vision
Vision is what you want your product or organization to get to, what are the “Big Hairy Audacious Goals”. You don’t need to be certain you will get to the final destination. Most visions are dreams that act as guiding north starts.
The best way to understand them is via examples, Here are a few:
- Google: “to provide access to the world’s information in one click”
- Microsoft: “a computer on every desk and in every home” (Earlier one by Bill Gates)
- Amazon: “Our vision is to be earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online.”
What is Mission
A mission statement is what your product or organization is doing right now to achieve an intended vision. While A vision can be dream, a mission is like a plan that needs to be executed today to get that dream. They need to be business objectives which you can use to prioritize your road maps and strategic goals.
How does it help?
Setting a vision and a mission does 2 important things:
-
It sets a destination (vision) and a path (mission) for your team to look at and can be used as a “Rally Cry” to motivate.
-
It also provides a prioritization function to everyone, anything that does not help the mission and vision has a low priority
Building & Selling Mission & Vision
This is a hard part. Mission & Vision statements should be as static as possible, changes can be made, but they should be rare and years apart.
A PM needs to talk to all stakeholders before setting the mission and vision statements as there should be no debates about it once set. Building the statements, like creative pursuits, needs many iterations.
When building these statements, start from the key problems you are trying to solve, and see if all of them can be condensed to a few words. Then write an explanation to each word selected so that the team know why each word was put in.
