Product vision blog is back

Welcome to the reboot of my blog about product vision, strategy, innovation and design.  The big theme of this blog is what it takes to conceive, design and deliver breakthrough products – especially products whose business success depend on people loving the experience of using them.

Who am I?

Why should you listen to me?  By all means, please do so at your leisure and pleasure!  But know that I’ve been designing, implementing and leading product creation in many diverse of contexts in Silicon Valley for over 25 years, it.  For seven years I have been leading 45+ designers and researchers as a vice president of UX at a global software company.

Why the combination of product vision, strategy and design?

For a couple of reasons.  First, product vision and strategy are actually design problems at heart.  Therefore they can be approached with a common principles, mindset and process.

Secondly, design cannot succeed without a solid product vision. If the product vision is not correct the design is not good or bad, it’s irrelevant.  If you really care about the ultimate goal of experience design — real people actually using and loving your product — you better be there with your user-centric perspective to ensure that the product vision is in their interests.

Thirdly, if you are a product company, then product vision and product strategy are inherently linked.  (It’s not the case in, say, commodity industries (detergent, nails, …) where the products are not terribly differentiated and where success depends on traditional factors like cost containment of distribution.)

So product vision, strategy and design are intrinsically linked.

Who are you?

That makes you, my audience, a little interesting.  You may be a UX designer or researcher who cares about design,  but you have a strategic bent and like to think more holistically about what your designs are doing for the user and for your company.  You may be a product manager who “gets it” — gets that if people love their experience using your product, even if it doesn’t have the longest feature list, you will have a disproportionate market advantage.  (And that if they don’t, you are already dead but don’t know it yet.)  Or you might be an executive of a product company who is

What are my goals?

Product vision, strategy and Design are timeless topics. This means that you will encounter the same dilemmas and debates over and over in your career.  You will find yourself arguing the same point over decades.  And you will find your skill at doing this increasing with experience.

What I would like to do here is fast forward your effectiveness at advancing these topics by giving you, your teams, and even your corporate culture ways of thinking about things that avoid timeless, predictable traps and let you achieve breakthrough innovations more systematically.  So my emphasis will be on strategic information which you can directly apply… either take it directly as I would implement it or season to the tastes of you or or organization.

Please help me by commenting — with kindness — and sharing your experiences and interests.

– Philip Haine