During a tour of NASA headquarters in 1961, President John F. Kennedy encountered a janitor mopping the floors. “Why are you working so late?” Kennedy asked. “Mr. President,” the janitor responded, “I'm helping put a man on the moon.”
The kind of singular focus and incredible connection to the ultimate goal in a person who was significantly far off from the actual space exploration program is simply astounding. The culture at NASA at the time had shifted from “I am mopping floors, or I am fixing a broken part” to “I am helping put a man on the moon.” One Single Vision.
Out of all the tasks that Product Managers perform on a day-to-day basis, I believe aligning a plethora of stakeholders from different backgrounds to a single vision is the most challenging. Creating a brilliant vision and strategy is pointless if a Product Manager cannot effectively communicate it with the people who matter. The challenge is even more complex because the people she is trying to influence simply know more about their respective fields than her.
The good part about this, though, is that all these communications are ultimately human-centered. All of our teammates and customers are humans, and we, as humans, are not as rational as we like to believe. Data may be the new truth, but in human interactions, emotions still overpower it. We are super emotional beings and the sensory inputs to our brain filter through the emotional centers first before the logical centers get a chance to analyze them. A great product manager knows how to use this to his advantage by crafting a product vision that evokes positive anxiety and excitement.
Crafting an Effective Product Vision
The first step towards this should be crafting an effective Product Vision. A vision that understands the problem extremely well. Focusing on the solution biases the approach and may end up putting efforts, resources, and time into building something that customers do not actually want. This flawed approach is often referred to as “Solution seeking a problem.” At this point, it is also important to understand that the user understands the pain but they, most of the time, cannot visualize a great solution. As Steve Jobs famously said, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” But the same man didn’t hesitate to talk to common users to understand and identify the problems worth solving. The focus on the problem also reduces overdependence on a single technology as the strategies are open to adapting solutions as long as they solve the same problem.
The Focus while communicating a product vision must be laser sharp - extremely specific. A vision may be very open-ended but the communication aspect of it should be extremely specific and concrete. It is much easier to rally a team around one single and focused goal than a number of diverse open-ended goals that just divide their attention. The first thing Steve Jobs, when he returned to Apple, did was to throw away almost 80% of the products Apple was building to keep the focus on building great products. John Kennedy reduced the number of NASA’s aspirations to ONE – Put a man on the moon and bring him back.
For a compelling vision, specificity alone is not enough. It must be accompanied by easy visualization. As Geordie Kaytes rightly puts it, “If you couldn’t hallucinate it, then it’s not a vision.” The advantage of having a visualizable vision is that people understand the goals, connect easily with them, and find them closer thereby leading to enhanced commitment.
Communicating the Vision effectively:
Once an effective vision has been meticulously crafted and objectives have been cemented, the next step is to connect the day-to-day work of team members with these concrete objectives. Hence, the large chunk of work must be broken into smaller pieces with a clear purpose of its own, so that the pieces when put together cascade into the ultimate goal. The role of a product manager is to effectively build and communicate this strong connection between the teams’ everyday work and the ultimate vision. Now that’s a complex task because the specificity of their daily responsibilities may not allow them to see the breadth and timelessness of the vision. The product manager’s duty is to help them see this connection so that they do not see the purpose of their hard work as an isolated series of tasks, instead, they must view their work as a critical component of a larger purpose.
To us, as humans, a greater sense of purpose brings more meaning to our work. A deep sense of a significant purpose pushes individuals to thrive in even the most challenging aspects – including workload, low wages, and stigmatized work. The goal of a Product Manager should be to position employees to experience greater purposefulness from their work by changing the purpose of work. For that purpose, it is important to emphasize the scale of the objective with metaphors, analogies, and unique figures of speech. Using relatable generic metaphors helps establish what the customer experience would look like at success, rather than a hypothetical comparison.
And at last, comes the data. Data is mandatory to add confidence in the vision. It will help answer the doubts and questions that important stakeholders and team members may have about the vision.
Communicating a vision is not making a presentation or reading out loud a vision statement. Not a singular event. It is a continuous process that could take months. A process worth investing in, because communication cannot be successful and meaningful without a receptive audience. Hence, it is equally important to invest in the foundation before investing in the vision. Again, there will always be people who will simply reject your vision, but you should focus on rallying the people who believe in your vision rather than converting the naysayers and haters. It’s the support of those who believe in your vision that will determine the success of your vision.
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