Skip to content
MPM Reforge
Articulate the vision for your scope of work
Overview
Just as a CEO has a vision for the company, you need a vision for your scope of PM work.
Scope vision is highly similar to company vision, it just differs in scale.
Your scope vision is a powerful tool that creates leverage in three ways:
What you'll do
1
Deep dive why vision narratives are important
Bold visions are one of your key tools for generating leverage and creating great product outcomes.
Consider Netflix as a proof point
Netflix pivoted from being primarily a DVD rental business to being an entertainment streaming giant. This monumental pivot would have never happened if CEO Reed Hastings didn’t have the vision to reinvent entertainment delivery.
To explain how monumental this was, consider Netflix’s company history. Netflix was operating at a loss for at least 3 years after its IPO and only became profitable in 2006 off the back of its rapidly growing DVD business.
It would have been easy to stay the course and continue investing in DVD rentals. Additionally, at the time, even the best internet speeds couldn’t handle the bitrate of high-resolution video, meaning DVDs looked far better than streaming video.
This made investing further in DVDs an even more seemingly logical choice. However, Netflix did the complete opposite, based on Reed Hastings’ vision.
The very next year in 2007, they invested $40M into developing streaming infrastructure, at a time when there was almost no demand for streaming services.
This decision, along with several other wise investments, is now viewed as the foundation for Netflix’s dramatic success story. In an industry where people want short-term returns, Netflix was able to paint a bold vision and buy enough time to pivot to where it is today.
Like Netflix, the best companies have a bold vision that drives their success.
Company vision vs. scope vision
As mentioned earlier, scope vision differs from company vision in scale.
Scope vision answers "In X years, how will your scope of work make the world a better place for your users?" whereas company vision answers, “In X years, how will your company make the world a better place for your users?”.
Consider the scope vision for Notejoy’s collaboration features PM. Notejoy is a collaborative notes app for teams and individuals.
The collaboration features PM is responsible for advancing the collaborativity of Notejoy. Some of the ways they do this are by implementing features like @ mentions, which tag other users for inputs, and threaded discussions, which allow collaborators to talk about a note on the note.
The collaboration features PM’s scope vision is focused on how the world will be better for Notejoy users 3-5 years from now, because of improvements in collaboration features.
In this scope vision, the PM explains:
Grasp how scope vision unlocks leverage
Your scope vision creates leverage in three ways:
2
Draft your vision
There are 4 key characteristics of a great vision that are important to keep in mind when drafting your scope vision.
Aspire towards a bold goal
One of the most common pieces of feedback that PMs get when presenting their vision to their manager or leadership is that it’s not aspirational enough. When a product doesn’t have an aspirational vision, it is often focused on a small problem.
Larger goals tend to tackle big problems. Solving big problems tends to create needle-moving results. As a result, leadership is much more likely to be bought in. This then results in you getting the right amount of resources and time to go work on the vision.
Be detailed and opinionated
This empowers your team to make independent decisions. Because you’ve outlined a specific point of view on solution elements, your team has a clear picture of the milestones they have to work towards.
As such, they have a clear picture of where they’re going, and they can better reason for themselves regarding what trade-offs they should be making to get to key milestones.
Focus on the user
This ensures that the product remains relevant and valuable to its target audience. A lack of focus on the end user results in a product that doesn’t deeply solve their problems, leading to low adoption and usage, and failure to create a needle-moving impact.
To illustrate this, consider the case of LinkedIn Sales Navigator. One of the scopes of work was to develop their mobile product.
An uninspired vision might be to port the desktop experience to mobile so that everything that could be done on the desktop could also be done on mobile.
However, the PM realized that the mobile user was using the Sales Navigator product in an entirely different context. If they shaped LinkedIn mobile to take advantage of this different context, they could have a greater impact.
They envisioned a product where a Salesperson could glance at their app for all their pre-meeting sales intelligence needs right before walking into a room, enabling them to quickly build relationships through common points of connection, shared interests, and more all from Sales Navigator.
This vision was highly aspirational, and as a result, leadership immediately green-lit the PM to build a team to work on it.
Consider the note-taking app Notejoy’s collaboration features vision.
They could have left it as a vague, high-level vision: “revolutionize the spread of ideas”.
However, they chose to make it much more specific. They specified that ideas would spread within organizations the same way they do on social media: virally.
This empowers the team. They know that their design has to facilitate viral sharing using social media as a model, instead of simply modeling off of Google Docs or Confluence.
Additionally, the vision calls out details like ‘library overviews’ and ‘weekly newsletters’ This lets the Notejoy team know to engineer and design with the eventual incorporation of library overviews and weekly newsletters in mind.
To illustrate this, consider Slack. Slack’s vision, published in 2014 by CEO Stewart Butterfield, was highly user-centric.
In the vision, CEO Stewart Butterfield says “What we are selling is not the software product...what we’re selling is organizational transformation. The software just happens to be the part we’re able to build and ship.”
Based on this user-centric vision, Slack ended up creating an extremely well-received product. User retention rates at the time of its Series D raise in 2014 were estimated to hover at an extremely high 93%.
3
Turn your draft into a narrative
Creating a great vision narrative requires departing from conventional wisdom. Instead of a short, vague vision statement, a vision narrative provides a detailed and compelling story that outlines the problem, the solution, and the impact on the end user.
A vision narrative is a 1-2 page written narrative that outlines your vision in detail. It consists of three major phases:
Start with the aspirational problem
This problem should represent a significant challenge or opportunity for your target audience.
A good guideline is that your problem shouldn’t just be what you’re solving in the next quarter; rather, it should be something that will require steady chipping away over a longer time horizon.
As a thought starter for brainstorming the aspirational problem, think about what the problem would be as you try to fill in the following sentence.
For [target audience], solving [problem] would be needle-moving because [reason].
Then convert this single thought into a vision narrative intro by illustrating the problem in more detail. To build up the tension and get stakeholders emotionally engaged, think about how to bring the problem you solve to life.
Some great ways to add emotion to issues are to use: anecdotes, videos, direct quotes, and thought exercises.
Brainstorm a detailed solution
Next, outline your proposed solution to this problem. Your solution should be both detailed and opinionated, providing a clear and specific path to solving the problem.
Don’t be limited by your short-term feasibility constraints. Think bigger by considering the following thought exercises:
When brainstorming, remember that you want your vision to become a useful guiding North Star for day-to-day product decisions.
Close with a user-centric resolution
Explain how the world is different once your vision has been pushed to completion.
Remember, the key is to make the audience feel how needle-moving your problem is. The same strategies used to make the problem feel big can be used to help magnify the feeling of resolution - i.e. anecdotes, videos, direct quotes, and thought exercises.
Check for alignment with product strategy
A great way to keep your vision tied to day-to-day reality is to ground your solution in your product strategy.
Your vision helps you win in the long term, while your helps you win in the short-middle term. This ensures you're working on initiatives that are relevant to both your immediate and future goals.
Let’s consider Lyft’s ‘The Third Transportation Revolution’ vision narrative written by its co-founder John Zimmer.
Aspirational problem
Cars have revolutionized transport, but have also made communities far more cut-off. Zimmer argues that the root cause of community cut-off is the inefficiency of car ownership. Cars require infrastructure like parking lots and street-side parking, and as such, they’ve forced out community spaces and housing.
He then asks the reader to go through a thought exercise. By having the reader experience and be present firsthand with the problem, he makes the reader keenly aware of the magnitude and stakes of the problem at hand.
Opinionated & detailed solution
To solve these challenges associated with the current transportation paradigm, he proposes a completely different paradigm: **transportation subscriptions.
Zimmer goes into detail on this solution, explaining that Lyft specifically needs to: “Shift to autonomous cars...transforming transportation into the ultimate subscription service”.
He further explains: “In a future subscription model, the network will cover all of these costs [fuel, maintenance, parking, and insurance]”
Understanding the vision to this level of detail empowers Lyft’s team. It helps them better determine the short-term roadmap changes they need to make to get to subscription autonomous cars and removes the Product team as a decision-making bottleneck.
User-centric resolution
Zimmer start with a detailed description of the new world: ‘‘Eventually, we’ll be able to turn parking lots back into parks. We’ll be able to shrink streets, expand sidewalks...That means more local shops and small businesses, more shared spaces, and more vibrant communities. This translates to better cities — and better lives — for people all over the world.”
They then support this with photo examples of the change.
Alignment with product strategy
Lyft’s solution directly builds off of its target audience - its current rider base. It also aligns with the same fundamental problem Lyft is solving - helping carless users move places.
The vision also builds directly on Lyft’s strategic differentiation. Lyft already excels in operational excellence and fleet management at scale; this would be further extended with a subscription program.
Here are some examples of how different companies might answer the brainstorming prompts:
4
Prepare to socialize your vision narrative
Once you have crafted your vision narrative, it's vital to stop and consider how you will socialize it. The process of socializing your vision narrative involves identifying the right stakeholders and choosing the appropriate forum for presentation.
Identify key stakeholders
To garner support and resources for your vision, you must first identify the key stakeholders: those individuals who directly control the approval and resourcing of the vision within your organization.
These are usually decision-makers such as your direct manager, the VP of Product, or other influential executives within the company.
Ask yourself: who are the most opinionated stakeholders who most directly control the approval and resourcing of the vision?
Choose an effective forum
Having identified your key stakeholders, the next step is to choose the right forum to present your vision narrative. Consider three vital factors:
Most often, your Product Review meeting is the most logical forum to use.
However, depending on your situation, you may very well find other meetings like a Design Review, or Quarterly Business Review to make more sense.
Consider Stakeholder Preferences: Each stakeholder may respond differently to various persuasion styles. It can be beneficial to ask your colleagues or manager about stakeholder preferences to tailor your presentation style accordingly.
Questions to consider include:
5
Tailor your presentation style
The final step is to adjust your presentation style to suit your stakeholders. There are six key persuasion styles to consider:
Framing
There are two common framing tactics: reframe risks as ambitions and leverage problem orientation.
Social proof
While you may not have the credibility yet established with key decision-makers you need to convince, others may. For example, suppose there is a peer that you know has the trust and ear of a key executive you need to convince. Get their buy-in before your big meeting, and plan some areas where they can voice their support.
Sources of social proof: within your company, customers, referencing practices from respected companies.
Goal seek
Key decision makers you need to influence likely all have a set of goals they are focused on at the moment. When you can explain how your vision helps them reach their own goals, it becomes a far more convincing and enticing initiative for the decision-maker to approve.
Inception
Sometimes decisions get stalled due to a stakeholder feeling that they need to push their ideas. To get around this, engineer situations that help key stakeholders feel like the vision is partly their own.
You can do this by: 1) involving the key stakeholder early in the process and 2) asking targeted questions to lead stakeholders to your same conclusion.
Citation
When it comes to sharing data, there is a quality gradient. The more the data is based on actions instead of surveys, your users instead of a general population, and recent instead of old data, the more convincing and powerful the data citation is.
Narration
When data fails to convince people, helping stakeholders visualize and viscerally feel what a customer goes through creates the emotional jolt that helps align them with the vision.
Let’s look at how Amar Anand, former PM at Twitter, leveraged goal seek and citation to increase the persuasion of his narrative on Digits.
Amar knew that Twitter was heavily focused on improving activation. Digits was a phone number-based, mobile-optimized onboarding process for Twitter. Implementing Digits would improve both acquisition and activation.
However, because Amar knew Twitter was heavily focused on improving activation, he chose to frame the pitch for Digits primarily in the context of improving activation.
He also knew that Twitter signups increasingly skewed mobile, instead of desktop. This made a better mobile onboarding process an increasingly important priority, which Digits would solve. So to make his argument for Digits more convincing, he made sure to cite the change in Twitter’s signup sources in his presentation.
Sachin used narration and social proof in the vision presentation for LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
Narration came in the form of illustrating the status quo for how a sales professional prospects for new leads. He compared and contrasted a day in the life of the sales professional. He illustrated how managing the prospecting process was significantly harder in the Salesforce case, effectively demonstrating how well Sales Navigator improved a key problem for salespeople: prospecting.
Sachin also knew their CEO frequently referred to Apple in all-hands meetings. Accordingly, when illustrating Sales Navigator’s initial beta success, they specifically made sure to get good quotes from Apple’s sales teams.
Recap
Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.
This is not the way.
Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (
CtrlP
) instead.