Any information can be placed in the sidebar to help your website visitors navigate your site.Why Product Vision?
We are called Product Vision Associates because of our emphasis on helping clients envision future products that customers love, and which support strong businesses.
Product vision is a common blind spot that causes undue risk, waste, and opportunity cost. Product vision has a huge influence on business success. Investing in improved product vision bit has a tremendous ROI.
Product vision has a profound influence on business success
- causes wasted time and effort as requirements shift while the team struggles to figure out what they are building, while they are trying to build it.
- causes products to be canceled outright late in the game, when it's finally realized that the idea just won't fly.
- leads to weakened competitive position as the organization is forced to justify and defend a sub-optimal approach. Sales are vulnerable to the first competitor that figures out the better formula.
The direct costs of a flawed vision are huge, and the opportunity costs are incalculable.
Strong product visions lead to:
- smooth execution and lower costs as the team has a clear direction for what it is they are building
- lower risk, as many of the foreseeable issues with the vision are eliminated before the project begins
And those are just the tactical benefits of a good product vision. A great product vision:
- creates highly differentiated products that command greater margins. It satisfies the right needs better, and is for that reason alone more desirable and worth paying more for.
- is defensible, and commands greater market share for years. Product visions are surprisingly difficult for other companies to replicate.
- can disrupt existing market leaders
- establishes a long-term direction for sustained growth
But what is product vision?
"That vision thing" is sometimes seen as a mystical gift that some special people possess. How such people arrive at their breakthrough ideas is a big mystery.
We think of product vision in much more definite terms.
Product vision is the discipline of imagining future products. If you are trying to create something different and important you need the skill of being able to imagine viable future realities.
A great product vision doesn't arrive out of thin air. It’s the result of careful study, synthesis, creativity, scrutiny, refinement and risk management. Great product vision can be achieved systematically.
Product vision is elusive
For such a critical element, product vision eludes most organizations. In our research, virtually all respondents were dissatisfied with the level of vision in their organization.
There are several reasons why product vision is so elusive:
- Product vision straddles disciplines, especially business and design. Product vision combines the designer's inventiveness and empathy for the customer with the business person's understanding of how to make an enterprise profitable. These two sensibilities are not normally combined.
(nb. the burgeoning field of Design Thinking applies a product design mentality to any business problem.) - Product vision is rarely isolated as its own step in the product creation process. You will almost never see a step in the new product process diagram for formulating the idea. By the time the project begins the vision is already implied. At the word go, each team member does his or her part to make it happen and the idea gets no further scrutiny until something starts to go wrong.
- There is a lack of a framework and methodology for conducting product vision. Even organizations that earnestly try and create great new product ideas struggle because they don't have an evolved framework to follow.
- Product vision is not easy. (see below)
Product vision is not easy
If product vision were easy, we'd see a lot more Apples around. Product vision is hard because:
- it demands that you know everything - the customer’s needs, their domain, business models, what’s achievable technically where the competition is heading, the universe of what is possible. You have to make sense of ambiguous user research and market intelligence.
- Product vision demands cross-functional skills: big-picture systems thinking, creative ideation and hard-nosed rigor and scrutiny. These ingredients are rarely found in one place at the same time by accident.
- Product vision is a search problem. You have to search under every rock for ideas, which demands thoroughness.
We often see organizations plunge forward with only a subset of these inputs, or after only having considered some of the possibilities. It's like they’re trying to bowl a strike with only a few pins standing. What's worse, they aren’t aware of the missing elements or alternate possibilities. This is what so predictably leads to products that flop.
Bowling a strike is only possible if all the pins are set up first. And great product vision is only possible if the components are all in place.
There is a great ROI on product vision
Investing a bit of time formulating the product vision before staffing up a project has a great ROI. It's fast and cheap relative to the cost of development. It avoids the costly disaster of building the wrong product. And, done well, it leads to products that are far more relevant to customers and which have better business models.
A good product vision process helps you get the upside of breakthrough innovations while reducing the associated risk. It does so by taking the guesswork out of new product definition. Instead of throwing darts in the dark, we place informed bets based on hypotheses that fall out of models of customer needs. We aim carefully, fire, recalibrate, and repeat.
A little bit of forethought before development gets started goes a long way.
Contact us with your questions.