Vision Statements

As we started a new year, we revisited the Vision of Vaporware. Your company’s vision is your dream for the future -- a final state that you can imagine the world in once your work is done. A company vision is a useful tool for aligning your team’s efforts around a common goal, activating their passions as part of your purpose-driven organization. While ours didn’t significantly change this year, it’s important to revisit your company’s vision regularly.

Product Vision

But what about your products? Have you defined your product’s vision? For every new product we help clients create, we document their Product Vision in a custom Product Blueprint. Half strategy, half plan, this Blueprint document helps align our team with our clients’ -- like a lighthouse -- towards the same unified destination. This helps shape the ongoing work around a central goal so that as members have to make daily decisions and tradeoffs, they can do so within the right context and framework.

Not Requirements

A Product Blueprint is not a Requirements Document. It’s not a contract that’s designed to list features and requirements around exactly what needs to be delivered. A requirements document simply doesn’t work in software development. Instead, our Product Blueprint is a shaping document that’s designed to enable the team to execute to the best of their ability within the boundaries that you provide them. This artifact is a great example of our Fixed Budget, Flexible Scope mindset that helps us deliver on time and on budget every time.

That said, the Product Blueprint is still not a one-and-done document. It’s a living artifact of the work that needs to be updated throughout the product’s life cycle. So, do you have a vision for your products? Is it well documented, communicated, and agreed upon by your team? What’s holding you back?

Send me a message if you’d like an example of our Product Blueprint.

Happy Planning,