The following blog post summarizes the fourth chapter of the Product Roadmaps Relaunched book by C. Todd Lombardo, Bruce McCarthy, Evan Ryan, and Michael Connors. Published on November 28, 2017. The fourth chapter is reviewed and summarized using my best judgment of the most essential information.
During any stage of the product development lifecycle, your product vision, mission, values and strategy act as a guiding compass for you and your team. It allows you to constantly reassess what you are working on, where your goals are and where you’re steering the proverbial “ship” to ensure that you’re still on track and aligned with the original purpose.
Mission
Your mission is not a goal of where you want to take your product seen through rose-coloured glasses; it is the intent of today. Where do you see yourself taking your product today?
There are four essential components to a well-drafted mission statement. The first is value; “what value does your mission bring to the world?” The key word here is mission, not product. These two values will be different because what value your product offers today will be a different value than what it will be in 1, 5, or 10 years; similar but different. The second is inspiration. “How does your mission inspire your team to make the vision a reality?” The third plausibility, although arguably, is closely tied to inspiration. “Is your mission realistic and achievable?” Lastly, there is specificity. “Is your mission specific to your business, industry, and/or sector?”
These components will help you ensure the mission statement you create is a viable and lucrative mission to pursue.
Vision
On the other hand, your vision is where you want to be, where you want to go and what you want to achieve. It is the long-term view of your efforts and achievements; this is your vision for the future.
Values
Your product values, like your personal values, shape who/what your product is. They outline how important or not certain actions or things are to your product.
When outlining your values, it is helpful to use the following value proposition template:
For: [target customer]
Who: [target customer’s needs]
The: [product name]
Is a: [product category name]
That: [product benefit/reason to buy]
Unlike: [competitors]
Our product: [differentiation]
Product Strategy
Your product strategy combines the abovementioned items, your product vision, mission and values. They unite what you want to achieve with what you are trying to achieve, your roadmap.
It is best practice to combine this information in a document accessible to your stakeholders for easy access and reference when needed; including during roadmapping sessions to help align stakeholders to your roadmap.
OKRs… so much more to come on this topic
OKRs, an acronym for objectives and key results, is a very popular goal-setting framework used by many companies nowadays. They consist of Objectives and Key Results (or you can think of them as key metrics) that will help you measure your success to that objective using your roadmap.
When your product strategy is outlined, you can derive OKRs to help you and your team achieve your product strategy. If you don’t have a strategy, your goal-setting will be ambiguous and will steer you away from the success of your mission. On the other hand, if you don’t have goals, you’ll never know what is most important to be working on next. Therefore, setting reasonable goals, using a framework like OKRs, paired with a product strategy, are mutually beneficial and will help you achieve your mission.
For more information on OKRs, I highly recommend “Measure What Matters” by John Doerr. This will be the next book I read and summarize, so stay tuned for that!