Visionary work. Part 1: Crafting a vision statement
How to craft an inspiring and ambitious vision statement for your product
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A few weeks back, I was curious what other designers think about vision and strategy. I asked my LinkedIn followers how important it is for designers to be able to craft or influence the product’s vision. While it’s not usually part of our job description, no one voted for “It’s not important.” 62% of respondents said “Extremely important,” and 38% said it’s “Somewhat important.”
A conclusion? We, as designers, want to create products that are not only nice-looking and easy to use. Our aspiration is to be in the driver’s seat and take a more strategic approach to our work.
Earlier this year, my product manager and I decided to spend an entire two-week sprint (which ended up being a significantly longer process) crafting the vision for our product. We have never done that before for this product. Someone else proposed the previous vision, which was quite vague and not bold enough. In the last couple of years, we have done everything to fulfil it, and it required an update.
In this two-part series, I’ll share the process of crafting the five-year vision statement and the mid-term strategy for the next twelve months (part 1 and part 2) and the key differences between a tactical approach and visionary work from a designer’s perspective (part 2).
Crafting a vision statement ain’t easy
After going through the entire process of crafting a vision statement and supporting strategy, one thing I can say for sure is that it’s not an easy task. If you think of a scale of ambiguity in projects you’ll be doing as a designer, this breaks the scale by an order of magnitude.
When you sit down and start the work with a blank sheet of paper, you know absolutely nothing. How can you tell what your customers will want in the next five years? What makes you think you would know what the world will look like in the next five years? How do you know where your business will be in the next five years?
Well, you can’t. But the fun part is that this whole exercise is about envisioning the future and trying to shape it as you want.
There are some more takeaways that I collected from this process:
Visionary work is hard. Having a sparring partner makes it easier.
When your organization already has a mission statement, it can inform your vision and be a nice starting point.
Vision should be bold and span a few good years in the future. There’s no point in not being ambitious.
Vision should inform the mid-term strategy that you and your team will commit to following.
Hang the vision statement on the wall so you can see it every day and refer to it when you are unsure if you are still on the right path.
I’m also sharing the entire process. It’s not a framework. It’s just a list of steps we naturally took, but somehow it clicked. Feel free to adjust it to your needs when you put effort into crafting a vision of your product.
It takes time to craft a vision
As you already know, two weeks weren’t enough to create the vision and efficiently communicate it. Instead, we spent almost two full months doing it. However, it was even a few months earlier that we took the first step and realized this work was needed. It’s a long process:
Realization
Mission statement as an inspiration
Wearing a detective’s hat
Finding adjacent areas
Drafting a bold statement
Supplementing it with a story (part 2)
Crafting a mid-term strategy (part 2)
Envisioning customers’ interaction in the next couple of years (part 2)
Addressing future needs (part 2)
Communicating vision to the stakeholders (part 2)
Let’s take a look at each step in detail.
1. Realization
When a year is coming to a close, product teams naturally start to plan the next twelve months, at least on a high level. Product leaders discuss with stakeholders what the organization's overarching goal will be next year and how each product can support it. When we approached this checkpoint at the end of Q3, we realized that we don’t only need the strategy for the next year, but also that our vision had to be slightly updated – or rather revamped from the ground up. Since the previous one seemed to be already fulfilled, we were forced to look for something completely new.
Such a realization may occur at various moments. It could be at a super early stage of a new project or a bit later if it wasn’t properly set in the beginning. The earlier, the better, as it sets the direction for the entire team and serves as a reference that people look at when in doubt and wondering if they are heading in the right direction.
2. Mission statement as an inspiration
Starting with a blank sheet of paper is super challenging, no matter what you are doing: writing an article, creating a prototype, or crafting a vision statement. As our previous vision wasn’t up to date or inspiring enough, we looked at the mission statement of our company as a stimulus.
Not gonna lie, we also looked at big players’ mission statements to see how they formulate their. But it wasn’t inspiring enough. Just look at Microsoft’s “We empower the world” or Apple’s “To create technology that empowers people and enriches their lives.” These are very broad and vague, as you would expect from a multi-billion-dollar corporation with hundreds of thousands of employees, multiple lines of business, and countless product teams.
If you want to get inspired by mission statements from other companies, look for smaller organizations, specifically those focused on one area of business, such as SaaS products. Of course, they have to be quite mature to have mission statements, but such companies exist.
3. Wearing a detective’s hat
As we already established, the level of ambiguity in such a project is at an extreme. Until you do some research, gather any data, and look for market signals, you’ll walk absolutely blind.
The first thing we did after we realized we needed to look far into the future was to set up a series of interviews with people from the customer-facing team. We asked them what our customers are talking about, but not in terms of our current offering or things we’ve already heard of and planned to address. Are there any potential use cases that we could address but haven’t considered before? Do we explore any new markets or industries? Is there any groundbreaking technology being developed behind the scenes that we could use or integrate with?
Additionally, we have also done our desk research. We looked for market signals and read a few reports from adjacent industries. We went quite broad, considering new markets and even entirely new products we could build on top of our existing technology.
4. Listing areas adjacent to our product
Our product, in short, serves as a delivery platform where our customers can pull the NatCat GIS data via API or through a user interface. They can preview these files to understand what natural catastrophe events are happening now and how they are impacting their businesses. So far, we are working with two types of customers and addressing some of their use cases.
In addition to thinking about other, less obvious use cases for the same customers (or for other customers from the same bucket), we decided to get creative and look further. We went broad and tried to list out every possible role or type of business that could benefit from the data product that we are offering. Later, we did a short analysis of opportunities to determine which ones are worth exploring further. We ended up with a shortlist of topics that seemed interesting and promising.
Once we had everything on a single board, we noticed a pattern: regardless of the industry or the jobs they may have (JBTD), on a very high level of abstraction, our customers come to us with questions, and we can provide them with insights.
That light bulb moment led us to craft a bold vision statement.
5. Drafting a bold vision statement
I can’t share the vision statement that we came up with yet, but believe me, it’s bold. And it should be bold and ambitious, because if it wasn’t, what would be the point of trying?
Once we figured out the pattern in how we might help our customers in the next couple of years, we spent a solid session on figuring out the wording. That was probably the worst part of this entire process. Even for me, who’s been writing articles for this newsletter for the last two years, coming up with one sentence that is ambitious, inspiring, and encapsulates everything that we want to achieve or the world we want to live in over the next five years is quite a challenge.
If you are facing the same challenge, follow the steps we have tried:
List out product areas you want to attack in the future period that you’re considering when working on a vision statement (e.g., as a fintech startup, in the next five years, we want to be doing more of automated investing and peer-to-peer lending).
Create a list of words that you feel should be a part of the vision statement (e.g., as a fintech startup, we want to be perceived as “safe” and “modern”, and we want to ultimately “change the way” people invest and lend money to friends).
Go crazy and throw out whatever comes to your mind. Write it down on a board. It’s your first draft, and you can continually improve it. It led us to create a sort of mind map. As we iterated on the statement, more words and product areas started popping up in our heads, eventually enabling us to form the final vision statement.
Got it?
Congratulations!
It takes blood and tears to come up with this one sentence that warms hearts, inspires, and leads through times of uncertainty.
But here’s the catch: your job isn’t over yet: you need a story and a strategy supporting the vision.
Now get some rest.
Part 2 in late November
The five remaining steps (Supplementing it with a story, Crafting a mid-term strategy, Envisioning customers’ interaction in the next couple of years, Addressing future needs, Communicating vision to the stakeholders) will be covered in part 2 (coming late November), in which I’ll also compare tactical design with visionary design in more detail. Subscribe and don’t miss it!
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Crafting a vision is never easy - it takes business acumen, deep expertise, and a sense of foresight. After all, most of us couldn’t even imagine what AI would bring just three years ago. Airbnb, for instance, started as something completely different before evolving into what it is today.
But I’ve always liked the word “craft.” According to the Cambridge Dictionary, it means “skill and experience, especially in relation to making objects.” To me, it implies a very human touch - deliberate, thoughtful, and hands-on.
We can craft a product in the direction we believe in, shaping every detail with intention. As Meta’s product leader Ami Vora once said, when building a product, close your eyes and imagine how you want your users to feel when they experience it. That’s where true craftsmanship begins.