A couple years ago, I worked with a startup that was having incredible issues focusing on target markets and therefore knowing what to do next. This isn’t an uncommon problem for startups. The guesswork was devastating to morale.
Who’s the customer?
If you don’t know who the customer is, how to frame your design decisions?
What’s the market for this solution?
If you don’t know what market this belongs in, how do you sell it?
What’s the TAM?
If you don’t know the value of the market, how do you know the amount of money you can pull out of it?
How do we engage the customer (once they’ve been identified)?
If you don’t know how to engage with customers, are you spending your VC wisely?
All these questions, among many others, must be answered. But to gain control and focus over your direction, you need vision. The vision should sound like, “We want the product(s) to do some big thing.” The vision is intended to provide the highest level of direction. When a new idea or need is presented, the vision should be the filter for that idea.
In the aforementioned startup case, to gain control or otherwise corral the lack of focus, I built an annual product vision that rolled up into the corporate vision. The vision is visualized below:
Roof: This is the overriding vision - the corporate strategy
Ceiling: A theme/annual product objective can be extracted from the corporate strategy
Pillars: These are the year’s areas of focus. The work you do should map into one or more of these
Foundation: a bandwidth allocation to ensuring your platform is stable
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