1. Start with why

Building a successful product involves many decisions made by several different stakeholders across the organization. One key challenge is to ensure that all the decisions align with, and contribute to, the successful launch of the product. Most product initiatives are launched by strategists and planners in response to certain business goals or identified market needs. In most organizations, approving the initiative and allocating the necessary resources requires a formal business justification, usually in the shape of a positive business case. The business case must establish the contribution of the intended product to the stated business goals. The business case is typically prepared by finance professionals, with input from the product owners or marketing.

After the product initiative is approved, the product-development process takes on a life of its own. It navigates the organizational complexity and passes through the boundaries of different organizational silos. As the product development progresses, it becomes increasingly disconnected from the initial strategic goals. The initial business justification tends to fade away as the different teams make tactical decisions and choices under the pressure of timelines and changing market dynamics. This disconnect could explain the remarkably high failure rate of new product launches, or the weak business value realization of new products. Business planners start the product initiative with a good idea of how the initiative will achieve its target business goals. However, they often express this linkage in high-level, strategic terms that are difficult to translate into specific guidance for the different stakeholders involved in the process.

For a more effective approach to product-strategy formulation, start by asking key questions such as the following:

• Why should the product be built?

• How will the product contribute to the achievement of the intended business outcomes?

• What value does the product create for the customer and the business?

• What does success look like?

Business-case development is delayed until these questions are answered, and the key value drivers for the product are identified. Quite often, the process of answering these key questions reveals subtle aspects of the product's value proposition or critical features. The result is a much more accurate and realistic business case and product roadmap.

A clearly articulated, well-communicated product vision is an excellent tool for working backwards. The vision helps the different contributing parties to the product-development process remain focused on the intended outcomes. To keep the journey going, these contributing parties must make many decisions, design choices, and trade-offs. A clear product vision is an excellent tool for guiding the decision-making process and supporting alignment among the different stakeholders.

It's imperative for the planners and the product team to understand the following:

• What constitutes a clear product vision

• How this vision answers the key questions for the product launch

• How to craft and communicate such a vision

The following sections explain the key components of the product vision and offer guidance on how to develop each component.

The vision statement

The design thinking approach to human-centric design provides a rich toolset that you can use to develop the product vision. The design thinking process starts with user empathy as the key lever to understand the customer's needs, desires, frustrations, and goals.

To guide the customer empathy process and focus it on business benefits and value realization, the product team starts by creating the product vision statement. This is a concise, structured statement that establishes the high-level ambitions for the product and clarifies the value it provides to the customer and to the business. The objectives and key results (OKR) framework is one useful tool that you can use at this stage to help the team clearly capture the following:

• A long-term view of the expected business benefits (the objectives)

• Specific shorter-term results that should be achieved to ensure the product is on track to deliver the longer-term business benefits (the key results)

During the vision-formulation stage, the product team focuses on identifying the business objectives for the product. Definition of the relevant key results takes place in stage 2.

User personas and the customer journey

This vision statement becomes the starting point for the customer research and empathy process. For this process, the user persona and customer journey maps provide sufficient clarity and detail. The user persona helps the product team understand how customers behave, and it answers key questions related to why and how customers will use the product. The customer journey map provides a visual representation of how the customer engages with the product. The map also offers a customer-centric view of how the customers perceive the product's value.

Early in the product-planning process, the product team identifies the target users of their product and explores themes or patterns of behavior. The team than uses those themes or patterns to sort users into user groups. Each group is represented by a user persona. This exercise helps the product team to answer important questions about the product's features and capabilities. For example, the product team might discover that serving a specific customer segment requires certain expensive features, which will dilute the product's business case. The product team can discuss whether to descope that specific customer segment or whether to deprioritize it until later a later version.

After the target user personas for the product are defined, the product team can develop the customer journey maps for these personas. Different techniques can be used to develop these journey maps, and the product team must choose the tools that best fit its ways of working. The important consideration is to ensure that the resulting customer journey maps contain the key information necessary to support product development. These include the following:

• The as-is customer journey

• The identified customer goals

• Challenges, frustrations, and friction in each journey step

• The target customer journey, and how it will relieve these frustrations and reduce the friction

• An initial view of the systems and technical capabilities that are used or needed to enable the transition from the as-is journey to the target journey

PR/FAQ

The product team can now use the data gathered and the decisions made to craft the product's press release and frequently asked questions (PR/FAQ). The press release and FAQ are important tools for working backwards. They solidify the scope, customer value, and business outcomes of the intended product. They also significantly improve communication of the product vision for internal and external stakeholders throughout the product-development process. Based on the PR/FAQ and the target customer journey map, the product team can plan product feature development in the form of epics or user stories. These epics or stories will be prioritized to form the product roadmap during the delivery planning step.

Together, the product vision statement, user personas and customer journey map, and the PR/FAQ constitute an effective product vision to guide decisions throughout the product-development process.