Strategy &
Vision vs. strategy
Metrics
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Covered in this lecture:
What do vision and strategy mean?
Vision is defined in the dictionary as: “a vivid mental image,
especially a fanciful one of the future”
Visionary is defined as: “(especially when referring to a
person), a visionary is one who is thinking about or
planning the future with imagination or wisdom.”
People that are considered visionaries are people that
have had opinions about the way the future could be or
should be that turned out to be right - either by pure luck,
or through the direct efforts of that person
When it comes to business, vision refers to imagining a
far reaching future that could be possible and working
towards making it happen
Strategy is the series of actions you take to achieve
your goal, and it’s usually planned out against an
opponent/competitor
Understanding the product Strategy &
development hierarchy Metrics
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The product development hierarchy
The product development hierarchy looks like this:
Goals > Initiatives > Releases > Features > Epics > User
stories / Tasks > Subtasks
Goals
- what you want to achieve to meet your vision (short term
or long term)
- example: “increase the user base by 10% by next year”
Initiatives
- high-level efforts that will help you achieve your goals
- example: “translate our app into 3 more languages”
Releases
- a release or delivery of a new customer experience at a
high level
- example: the release of our app with the 3 new language
translations
Features
- one or several sets of capabilities delivered to the end
user
- example: the ability for the user to change the language
the app is displayed in
Epics
- related bodies of work which can not be completed in 1
week, and or will take 1 sprint or more to complete
- example: “prepare the interface to display the long
German words”
User stories / Tasks
- a set of things to be done that deliver user value and
come together to form the completion of an epic
- example: prepare our back-end systems to handle inputs
from 3 more different character types in the new languages
User stories are formatted like this: “As a USER, I want
to DO X THING, so that I can SEE Y THING”
Subtasks
- one or many things that need to be done to complete a
user story or higher level task
- they are usually very granular and technical in nature
You must complete the smaller things in order to
complete the larger things up the chain
A deeper dive on Strategy &
the art of vision Metrics
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History lesson about vision
Famous quote attributed to Henry Ford (there's no
evidence that he said this though):
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would
have said faster horses”
Consumers can’t always envision a future that’s too far
ahead
Ford Motor Corporation created the world’s first affordable
mass-produced car
Henry Ford envisioned a world where anyone could afford
a car, and his strategy for making that a reality was to focus
on only one model and make it better and cheaper over
time
In the 1920s, General Motors took the opposite approach
and started making several models of cars at different price
points for different purposes, and it soon became more
popular than Ford
The lesson is that your vision has to be continuously
checked against reality and adapted to how the world
changes
There are two major types of vision:
- Global vision - how you think the world will look in the far
future
- Company or product vision - how your company/product
will look or what it will do in the future
A company vision is something you establish as a CEO or
founder
A product vision is what you establish as a product
manager
To be a true visionary, you have to have strong opinions,
big imagination, and know your market
You have to find a balance between listening to customer
feedback and inventing things people don’t know they
want yet
How to set vision as a Strategy &
leader, CEO, or PM Metrics
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Benefits of having a clear vision
The ability to set a vision for a product, team, or entire
company is a key responsibility of any product manager
Having a clear vision:
- allows you to work backwards and understand which
goals you need to achieve in order to get there
- allows everyone in your team or at your company to
make the right decisions autonomously
Don’t be a micromanager, let people do the jobs they were
hired for
After we add vision, the product development hierarchy is
now complete:
Global vision > Company / Product vision > Goals >
Initiatives > Releases > Features > Epics > User stories /
Tasks > Subtasks
The global vision is an informed opinion on what the world,
technology, and industry will be like in 3, 5, 10, or 20 years
The company or product vision is how you want your
product or company to fit into the world you described in
the global vision
Real world examples Strategy &
of great vision Metrics
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Examples of great vision using the framework
#1 Facebook
Global vision:
- In the future, every single person on the planet will be
connected to the internet
- Artificial intelligence will be good enough that we can talk
to computers like humans
- VR / AR will be a vital part of daily life for most people
Company vision:
- By 2026, every single person on the planet will be
connected inside some part of the Facebook ecosystem -
over a billion new users - with the majority of these new
users enabled via the internet.org operation (drone
internet)
Goals:
- Continue expanding and improving the portfolio of
Facebook products over the next 3 years to:
1) increase the number of connections between users and
2) increase the amount of time spent within the Facebook
ecosystem, thus increasing the amount of data collected
from them in various contexts
- Connect the rest of the world by 2026 - people in areas
of the world where they currently do not have internet
access.
- Be a foremost provider of VR / AR hardware as well as
experiences and content for it
Initiatives:
- Build the technology necessary (their drone and other
initiatives in internet.org) to give people in developing
nations network access where it did not exist before
- Establish relationships with the governments of all nations,
but especially developing nations, to enable citizens to use
the technology above
- As time goes on, invest increasing amounts in
connectivity, AR / VR, and AI
#2 SpaceX
Global vision:
- In the future, due to a combination of necessity and
curiosity, humans must be / will be a multi-planetary
species to ensure our survival
- One big reason this global vision is able to be backed up
is that Elon Musk publicly stated that he and SpaceX
believe that "A future where humanity is out exploring the
stars is fundamentally more exciting than one where we are
not"
- Mars will be the first extra-terrestrial location to establish
human life on, given our current understanding. By
eventually terraforming it, humans could establish a
civilization there indefinitely
- Government-led programs to accomplish this are much
less effective and will not produce the desired results in
time
Company vision:
- By the year 2030, SpaceX will have developed and be
the primary provider of technologies to make interplanetary
travel and inhabitation for all humans possible, with the
ultimate goal of enabling human life on Mars
- We will revolutionize re-usable vehicles as opposed to
developing propulsion technology, as we know that this the
biggest key to rapid cost reduction in space travel
Goals:
- By the year 2030, improve the cost and reliability of
access to space, ultimately by a factor of ten (making it cost
$500 per pound / $1,100/kg or less). This means the
average cost of a Mars trip would be about $200,000 and
decrease rapidly from there
- SpaceX should be the largest and most reliable contractor
for governments to deliver goods to space
- By the end of 2018, further increase profitability by
securing contracts with governments to fly humans to the
ISS cheaper than they can
- By mid-2019, launch our first unmanned mission to Mars -
a robotic test flight with a modified Dragon capsule
- Each year, the SpaceX business should be profitable
enough to fund and develop the technology necessary to
send humans to Mars on the side
Initiatives:
- Fund the goals and vision by continuing to make a profit
delivering satellites and cargo to space for governments
and other entities
- Build and make reliable a re-usable first stage rocket to
reduce costs and increase profitability
- Build an autonomous sea-going landing vehicle to
intercept the reusable rocket (drone ship)
- Build spacecraft with progressively heavier payloads to
land higher value contracts and gain knowledge for
payload capacities that will be necessary for Mars missions
- Prepare our rockets for human cargo in mid-2019 (and
thus more government contracts) by building human safety
features. Firstly, we will build a launch abort system to allow
humans to safely escape a Falcon 9 rocket in the event of
a launch failure
Strategy &
Product strategy 101
Metrics
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What strategy means
Strategy is the series of actions you take to achieve a
goal, based on your vision of the future
Michael Porter’s 3 generic competition strategies:
#1 Cost
- provide a product that is cheaper than anyone else in
your industry
#2 Differentiation
- provide a different experience or feature set than
anyone else in your industry
#3 Focus
- focus on a very narrow market while ignoring the rest,
as opposed to the first two which are focused on broad
ones
- the focus strategy has two subsets: cost &
differentiation
Unfortunately, there is no definition or guide to being
strategic, but there are 2 things you should keep in mind:
#1 Strategy is something that you do to achieve a goal of
some kind, and it’s necessary primarily because there are
competitors, potential competitors, or some other force
that are likely to impede you from achieving your goals
#2 Strategy is something that takes place in any level of
a business, everywhere from the tiniest product details to
the biggest market entrances
To be a good strategist, you have to know more about your
market, technology, and trends, and be cleverer than your
competitors
Real world examples Strategy &
of strategy Metrics
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Examples of great strategy
#1 Cole’s friend
Global vision:
- oil is going to be less common and more expensive
- transportation will still be needed
- electric vehicles won’t be effective enough to replace all
vehicles
Research findings:
- less than 10% from the energy coming from a car's engine
is actually used in moving the car forward
- no one was doing anything about all of the energy lost in
the suspension of a car via the shocks moving up and
down while driving
Strategy:
- he made a shock absorber prototype that used the shock
energy to power the radio and other things in the car
- the invention is only worth it for large, heavy vehicles but
could save shipping companies a fortune
#2 Amazon
Goal:
- gather valuable information about a series of cities and
their inhabitants
Strategy:
- they said they were going to have a new headquarter in
one of the cities
- they collected a lot of information about all the cities,
including how much money they were willing to spend on
Amazon
- in the end, they only ended up with 2 additional
headquarters, but got all the information they needed
#3 Bill Gates & Microsoft
Global vision:
- everyone will need a software to run their computers
Strategy:
- he built MS-DOS for IBM, based on QDOS, an operating
system created by Seattle Computer Products
- he purchased all the rights to the QDOS operating system
- when other hardware makers started copying IBMs
computers, he licensed MS-DOS to all of them (which later
became Windows)
Another great example of strategy is when Steve Jobs
started making Apple computers and he decided to make
their own operating system instead of buying it from
Microsoft
#4 Airbnb
Global vision:
- people will rent air mattresses in someone else’s house
Strategy:
- at first, the website wasn’t very successful because
people uploaded poor quality photos of their spaces
- the founders decided to send professional photographers
to people’s houses and take better quality photos to put on
the website
Result:
- sales increased exponentially
Strategy &
Putting it all together
Metrics
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Vision as a PM vs. a CEO
Important things to keep in mind:
#1 You can’t create any good products or lead any
company well without having clear, defined, transparent
goals that are visible to everyone
#2 You can’t have good goals without first having a vision
for where your product or company fits into the world in the
future
#3 You can’t have a good product or company vision
without having a global vision, which is your prediction for
how the world will be in the future
#4 To have the best global vision possible, you’ve got to
be as knowledgeable as possible about your industry,
technology, global events, and trends
#5 Re-assess your global and company vision on a regular
basis
#6 Strategy isn’t limited to one part of the development
hierarchy - it can happen in any part of it
If you’re a CEO, founder, or entrepreneur of any kind, you
need to have a global vision and company vision
If you’re a PM inside a company and the CEO already has
a global vision, company vision, and clear goals, you
STILL need to have a vision for your product or feature
set - even a global vision, but a narrower one
Example: PM at Facebook, in charge of the photos feature
- global vision: the role photos will play in the world in the
future
- product vision: how your photo features at Facebook will
play a role in that future
Strategy &
Recap: Roadmapping
Metrics
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Reasons why we do roadmaps
and alternatives
Every company does roadmapping differently
Roadmaps are usually inaccurate, but they are good to
have as a general guide
Why do companies do roadmaps?
1. Executives and investors like to see quarter-based maps
2. You could be against an actual deadline
The alternative is to sort things depending on priorities
>> Near-term, Mid-term, Long term
This method keeps everyone in line but doesn't impose
strict deadlines
Agile roadmapping using Strategy &
vision and OKRs Metrics
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What OKRs are and how they're used
Roadmaps are documents that tell people like executives
or investors what features or products will be launching at
what times
In Agile product development, roadmaps are almost always
inaccurate
In order for a roadmap to be useful, you need to have clear
goals, which come from a clear global and
product/company vision
PMs establish goals for their products that help the
company accomplish the larger company goals
Executives or CEOs establish company goals that help
move the company towards their company vision
Instead of traditional roadmaps, it’s better to use OKRs -
Objectives and Key Results
According to John Doerr, who came up with the OKR
method, the proper way to write an OKR is like this:
“I will X as measured by Y”
- X is the objective
- Y is the set of key results you’re looking to achieve
A roadmap based on OKRs shows everyone what user
needs everyone else is working on without committing to
any specific way they’ll be solved
