Product Vision: Aligning all teams
You take a walk down the street. En route, you see a street vendor with a flourishing food business. He has drawn quite a crowd and has 2 assistants helping him prepare the dishes at supersonic speed, manning the cash counter and handing out the dishes to customers piling up.
You go back to him later after he has packed up for the day, get chatting and ask about what future plans he has for his business. He talks to you about opening another shack elsewhere to take home a revenue bump and getting his kids to college, but beyond that he doesn’t talk of any larger vision.
So at this point – you start thinking: “I work for this big corporate. Am sure we have a Vision+Mission statement. I don’t know what it sounds like. Wait, do we really have one now?”
Turns out that in many corporates, the vision and mission and other lofty goals are often written and put up on the website, which no internal stakeholder ever reads. Does this mean the large MNC you work for is a large directionless, rudderless boat, adrift in the open ocean? Does it mean some top management guy worked with an agency to get a great-sounding Vision statement – and forgot to socialize it with the people who really should be aligned with it?
Let’s take a look at some Vision Narratives:
McDonald’s® Brand vision is “To be the best quick service restaurant experience”. Being the best means providing outstanding quality, service, cleanliness, and value, so that we make every customer in every restaurant smile.
On SpaceX, Elon Musk says: “It is important that Humanity becomes an Interplanetary Species”
Merck (the pharma company): With our research-driven specialty businesses, we help patients, customers, partners and our communities around the world live a better life…
Google: Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Do observe how Vision captures the essence of why you do what you do. It is usually a deeper, loftier goal that lets you make a difference for yourself and others, doing what you do.
Aligning your entire Workforce to your Company’s Vision:
Let’s say you start on your own. You put on your deep thinking hat and see what really is the larger purpose of the Product or Company you are building. Now, how would you go about aligning your entire workforce to the Product / Company Vision?
If your Vision statement is in the heads of a few select people at the top, and never percolates to all people working for the company – you might as well save yourself the effort of coming up with the Vision in the first place. But if you are keen to socialize the Company or Product Vision with everyone, then:
- Articulate the well thought-out Vision
- Inspire the team with the Vision – several times
- Get it to sink in – deep enough that stakeholders can repeat the actual words, believe in them and work towards the Vision
Strategy driven by Core Values:
Once the strong Vision finds a place in the hearts of all stakeholders, you can now define the Strategies that will help you achieve that Vision. However, Strategies can come in White, Black and many shades of Grey. For example: your strategy could be to keep running a Loss till you bleed out all competition in the market. Your strategy could be to take a first mover advantage and skim the market and be a price-setter. Whatever your Strategies may be; before you frame your Strategies, you will want to define what your Core Values are.
Core Values draw the Lines to define how you and everybody else who keep the company or product running, will conduct yourselves. What ideals will you bind yourself to while building your Strategies. So when someone in your team comes up with a bright idea, she or he will himself or herself pass it through the Core Values filter to see if it fits in with the Ideals and Boundaries defined. If it does not pass the filter, the idea doesn’t fly, however bright it might be.
Making it Happen:
Once the Vision and Strategies guided by Core Values are all in place, you get down to focussed execution. When execution begins, and everybody is aligned with the overarching philosophy and the common goals – it is efficient and driven by a sense of purpose. And when this happens, great products and companies get built – at scale.
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Originally published at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/product-vision-aligning-anand-chintalavadi-r/
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