How's Your Vision?!

Photo by Devin Avery on Unsplash

As a Product Owner
I want to give a higher purpose to the product my team is building
So that they are inspired and motivated to create and innovate great things that provide value for our customers.

Who are Your Customers?

A key step in creating a great vision for your product is truly understanding your target customers. This can take time, effort and a lot of research to gather information about their needs, wants and desires. Don't fret though, this is certainly not time wasted. One approach is to create customer personas. A persona is a realistic depiction of an actual customer. It generally includes a photo along with key characteristics that help you and your team better understand and empathize with them. When creating your first persona, I recommend taking the lean startup  minimum viable product (MVP) approach. In this case, it would be a minimum viable persona! All this means is gather just enough information about one of your target customers to get started. As you iterate your product, continue to enhance and create more personas to represent additional unique qualities for various types of customers. This approach will set you and your team in the right direction.

Why Have a Product Vision?

Most companies have mission statements, but might stop there. Go further! Treat each product like it's own startup company. Establish a vision for that product that aligns to the companies overall mission and vision. Doing this at the product level gives the team building it something to rally behind. A good product vision not only inspires and motivates the team, but more importantly empowers them to build something great for their customers!

3 Key Elements of a Product Mission

Purpose
The vision should declare the product's purpose, it's reason for being and why it exists. This is accomplished through a unique description of the product including its function and objectives. At a minimum, it should state what the product does for its customers. It also provides insights on the value a customer gets from the product.

Inspiration
Think about your customer's journey and why they would use your product… What value will they get out of it? What do they want or need? Why is your product the best for meeting their wants/needs? What will make them stick around or come back to your product? Take time to craft a story. This will help you identify what will inspire a customer to choose your product. You can also take another angle. As a customer yourself, what makes you buy one product over another? You're likely to consider a number of factors including quality, design, cost and other aspects important to you. In addition to these considerations, I'd venture to guess you're more likely to purchase a product or service if it inspires you. A good product vision does just that. While it may not necessarily be shared externally, it shoudl still be stated in a way that would get potential customers excited about it's purpose and what it has to offer!

Differentiator
To be successful, a product needs to having something that's unique. It's special sauce. As a Product Owner or Manager, you need to be able to convey this differentiator in simple terms. If the vision of the product is too generic or broad, then it likely won't achieve it's intended purpose.

2 Additional Considerations

Authenticity
This can't be overstated. Authenticity is absolutely critical. Be genuine and ensure you stay true to who you are and what your product is actually all about. Creating a vision for the sake of having one won't add any value. They should be leveraged and referenced often to ensure the teams stay aligned to the purpose of the product. They should be utilized to streamline process. They should be a mechanism to determine if a process adds value to the customer and aligns to what product is trying to achieve. If your product's vision simply becomes words on paper or a website, then you're wasting your time.

Alignment
The vision of any given product should be in line with the company's vision and mission. Alignment is crucial as it aligns the purpose of the product to the larger organization. If this pattern is followed by multiple products, then the strength of the company's mission is reinforced and even more powerful. Obviously, alignment is only needed when a company has more than one product. If a company is just starting out and only has a single product, then the company and product visions are synonymous.

Crafting the Daily Scrum's Vision

Ok, enough with the "why & how" behind having a vision. Let's get practical and talk about how we crafted the vision for the Daily Scrum...

During my tenure as a Scrum Master and Agile Coach/Trainer, I've encountered many cases of "an agile approach sounds great, but it won't work for me or my team because [insert reason here]". My guess is I'm not alone. In fact, I'd bet that a majority of other people in similar roles have heard this same thing. Many individuals start off their agile journey by attending some sort of training course to gain a base set of agile knowledge. While there are some good training courses out there, many of the individuals that attend these trainings struggle with how to apply what they just learned to their actual work. That's where the idea and purpose for the Daily Scrum came from. To help bridge the gap between learning/training and the real world.

Once I had established the purpose of the Daily Scrum, I built out a few personas. A certified Scrum Master with 2 years of experience at a company going through an agile transformation. The Marketing Professional that is interested in reorganizing into cross-functional teams and taking a new approach, but struggles with translating typical software development or generic examples into how agile can work for her marketing team. An Agile Coach that is a consultant and agile purist who coaches by the book but sometimes struggles with practical application in complex environments. The tenured developer that is resistant to change who stands behind the "this is how we've always done things" mentality. These are just a few of the personas created for the Daily Scrum.

Now that I had a better understanding of potential users of the Daily Scrum, I started to craft a story. While I didn't literally write a story, I took notes on what I had encountered taking training courses when I first started out vs more recently after I had more agile experience. I remembered the discussions that were had and the questions that were asked in each of the sessions. I thought about the challenges that were raised. I noted the responses from the trainers to some of these challenges. Some helpful and insightful while others were lacking substance and practicality. All of these things helped me formulate the story in my mind, and why people would be inspired to visit the Daily Scrum!

One of the key differentiators of the Daily Scrum is the aspect of having visitors share their unique agility challenges. The Daily Scrum community can then collaborate to share practical ideas, insights and examples that are relevant to the specific situation.

As I started sharing the idea and purpose of the Daily Scrum with others, I received great feedback, support and motivation to get it launched. The mission practically revealed itself. The more people I talked to about it, the more genuine excitement I felt and also saw in them. This confirmed that the vision was authentic, something that I could be proud of and that will help guide the way forward for the Daily Scrum and it's community.

The Daily Scrum's vision is to...

Build a community that collaborates and shares ideas to help solve real agility challenges faced by individuals, teams and companies each day.
A community for learning.
A community for sharing.
A community for collaborating.
A community for practicality.
A community for agility.

Thank you for taking the time to visit the Daily Scrum and read this post! I would love to hear your feedback in the comments below.