 Hi, everyone, and thanks for joining. I'm here today to talk to you about capturing your product vision and strategy in one powerful document. If you've been through this exercise, you know that a tremendous amount of work goes into developing a product vision and strategy. This session focuses on how to represent that work in written form so you can inspire followers and sponsors of your vision and build trust with a solid strategy that gives people confidence and how you'll execute. Being audacious and pragmatic in one document, takes some practice and skill, but there are also some ways to break this down and make it less of a challenge. First, a little bit about me. My name is Erin Streeter. I'm a senior PM at Google, and prior to that, I held product roles at Forrester Research, always with a focus on customer success and client service. I've written many vision and strategy docs in my career so far, and I'm glad to be here with all of you to share some of what I've learned along the way. I'll start with some ways to think about vision and strategy. They're linked, but they're definitely distinct. I like to think of the vision as the destination and the strategy as the map. You can't draw a map without a destination in mind, and you can't reach your destination without a plan to get there. So they have to go hand in hand. If your vision is your destination, you can think of your strategy as the route you're going to take to get there. Not just which roads, but your modes of transportation and your stops along the way. If you don't take the time to plan out your vision and strategy, it's kind of like getting in your car and just starting to drive. You're in motion and you might get close to where you wanted to go, but it's not very likely. So let's say you want to climb a mountain. Nobody's ever climbed before. Maybe it's on Mars. You might even need to convince some people to go with you. So they need to understand why this is a great idea and what everybody stands to gain. You'll need to paint a convincing picture of what that view will be like or what life will be like after you've achieved this together. You'll also need a really thoughtful plan to get there. This is going to help minimize risk and maximize your chances of being successful. People will want to see and understand the plan before they jump on board to do this. And just as important as what you will do is what you won't do. This is your vision to summit the mountain and your strategy, the plan to get there. And there's more important ground to cover like your guiding principles and the impact you expect to have. As a product manager, you need to present all of this in one simple, easy to understand document and the template looks something like this. It looks like a lot, but if you approach it step by step, it doesn't have to be complicated. And sort of like a mountain, the part you see is only the part above sea level. Your vision and strategy has to be condensed into a really small package, even when all the hard work you did to develop the vision and plan the strategy in the first place sits below the surface. So how can you do this? This session is a practical guide to combining the audacious vision and the pragmatic plan. In this session, I'll introduce the sections of a strong vision and strategy doc and examine them one by one. So this is gonna be a crash course in how to express the problem you're trying to solve, how to articulate a product vision, how to define your product principles, explain your impact and then draft that initial strategy. Before we get started, I have a few tips to keep in mind and these take time to develop but you can always start now. You're gonna be able to help people follow along by first using facts to build an evidence-based case and then using fiction or narrative to tell a compelling story. So you've got to balance those two. You should always think of the through line. What's your company vision? Your department's mission? What's the through line from those to what you're proposing? You'll also want to approach your metrics this way. What's your company and business to achieve? How does your proposal support that? And lastly, write with simplicity. And the best way to think about this is to write as though you're actually speaking to someone. So in the template example that I just shared, I called this first section the overview but it's really where you're defining the problem space. This is the place where you wanna draw people in with a compelling case for action. So who has a problem and what is it? Why is it critical that you solve it and then tie that to your vision or the solution to the problem that you're proposing? I've split problem and vision into two sections here but they really do go together as the problem and solution. These two sections together read a lot like a Pixar movie where you first set up the problem or the conflict and show how your users are in some kind of jeopardy. And then with your vision, a great solution comes along that makes their lives a lot better. Assuming you have a credible problem that you've backed up with research, this is your opportunity to build a brief evidence-based case. So how does this problem manifest for your users? What evidence do you have? You're setting the stage for your vision and you need to draw a sharp contrast between the challenges of today and the much better future that's possible. In this pretend example, we're setting up the problem just like a Pixar movie. So once upon a time and every day, adults trying to learn new job skills on YouTube struggle to find the right content. Just 16% of adults report successfully mastering a new job-related skill via YouTube. And I'll caveat, these are all completely pretend statistics here. This is limiting career advancement and impacting their earning potential. And a recent analysis showed that acquiring a new skill is worth an average of $100,000 in lifetime earnings for US workers without a college degree. At the same time, video-based learning offerings from Coursera and LinkedIn learning are increasingly targeting job-related skills. So what can we do about this? Well, you need a vision. This is the part of the doc where you get to paint a picture of what the world will look like when you're done with it. And it's really critical that this is concise and compelling, which is the hardest part. So you should be spending a lot of time drafting and redrafting this section until you get it right. This probably means writing it once and walking away, then revisiting it and getting feedback and boiling it down to just a few powerful sentences. A product visioning is a discipline unto itself done really well. It takes an entire cross-functional team that includes UX, plenty of research. Here, I'm assuming you have a pretty good idea of how you plan to solve the problem you just described. But to convince people, you should go execute that solution. You have to connect it to a bigger, more inspiring picture. So as I said, I'm not gonna cover the process of developing a product vision, but you can create a sketch in a relatively short amount of time if you cover your bases. So in conveying that vision, you're describing a possible future that takes all of these things into account. And as for what you write down on paper, probably the most important thing to consider is that your vision explains how you'll solve the problem in a way that reflects what your company is in business to do and what makes your company unique. And don't get too tangled up in vision, mission, values, statements. You can take inspiration from any one of those to help shape your own vision. So if we take Google as an example and the problem of people needing to find the right content to learn new job skills on YouTube, what are some of the things we'd wanna consider in our vision? Well, based on what I just said, we'd probably wanna consider how we'd source and organize useful content, how we'd help people find it and engage with it in new ways and leverage some of Google's differentiating strengths, like in data analytics. So here is a pretend vision that we can examine a little more closely. And this is just an example and not the most powerful product vision ever written, but I wanna call out a few things. First things first, this describes an ideal future, but it does not mention exactly how or exactly what the solution is. There are some hints, but the key is that the vision is not constrained by any particular technology solution. It should have plenty of room for future innovation. It's also not a vision statement. That might be important later on, but when you're just proposing a vision and strategy, you don't need to worry about that yet. Just focus on the three or four sentences that will help a reader understand what the world is like when you've executed this strategy and landed this new product concept. So to break this down, first you wanna highlight some principles. So here we're saying we think learning should be free and easy to access. So think about the convictions that are shaping your solution or your principles. We'll talk about these in just a minute. What are some of the tenets that you subscribe to about this problem space? Maybe that you formed in your interviews with users. You should also give a high level description of your solution again without confining it to a particular technology or boxing yourself into something that sounds too narrow to have the space to grow and innovate over time. So here we envision a new learning experience. It's going to connect creators, learners and employers in a mutually beneficial marketplace of high quality content and verified skills. And lastly, make sure people understand why this is significant and how your users will be impacted by what you're proposing. We can empower people to grow their careers and match employers with skilled talent without the expense of a university education. Now let's talk about product principles. Why do we include these in a vision and strategy document in the first place? So if you're familiar with Marty Kagan, you know he's a big proponent of product principles. In his words, product principles refer to the nature of the product you're building and they help you get a much clearer picture of what you believe and what is important. Product principles are helpful to you but they're also helpful to your readers because product principles help them understand what's driving your product decisions. And since so much of strategy is making a choice about what you will or won't do, having guiding principles makes those choices easy for everyone to understand. It reassures stakeholders that you have a well-defined compass that's guiding your initial proposal and can guide your future decisions. So be sure to reflect what you've boiled down as strategic and fundamental to your work in this problem space. What are the non-negotiables for users and what really matters to them? Let's take a closer look. So these are some actual product principles that I've included in a vision and strategy document in the past with a few of the specifics stripped out. Sometimes these principles can also address objections or questions you've gotten from stakeholders in the development of your vision and strategy. So for example, in the third bullet, I'm drawing a clear line between the purpose of a dashboarding tool and what I'm proposing. I want everyone to understand that I'm not proposing a static tool. So when someone asks, is this just a dashboard? We have a clear answer. We can draw a clear distinction. These are also a great reference. So anyone joining this team in the future knows what drives our decision-making process and I can refer back to them over time to make sure that I'm being true to these initial principles. Okay, so at this point in your document, you convinced everyone there's a problem that needs solving. You've shared your vision for the future where this problem is solved and you've stated the core principles that are going to guide your product decisions. So let's talk a little bit about impact. For people to really get on board with your proposal, they have to believe it will have a meaningful impact. That means impact for users and impact on the company's business goals. They also need to understand how you'll know you're on track. So what are those input metrics that are going to tell you when to course correct? Developing a measurement framework takes time and it's really best done in partnership with your data science team. But in your initial vision and strategy doc, you just need to make a reasonable case for impact. It's great if you can make a data-driven claim that your product's going to generate X billion dollars in revenue over X years or grow your engaged customer base by 50%. But if you don't have that yet, that's perfectly okay. I like to use something called the North Star Framework to structure this part of my document, since a really simple and easy to understand way to describe the relationship between metrics. So to start with, think about a business outcome your proposal most relates to. And ideally it's something that's currently really important to your company. Maybe that's top line revenue growth, maybe it's operational efficiency or profitability. Then think about how your product contributes to that outcome. That primary contribution should be your North Star metric, a leading indicator of some sustainable business performance and customer value. So let's take this back to our mountain climbing example. Your ultimate goal is to get to the top, but it doesn't do a lot of good to just measure whether you're at the top or not. It also doesn't tell you enough to be actionable. So what's the primary indicator of whether you will reach the top? Probably your average speed, this is your North Star or your leading indicator that's descriptive enough for you to take action before it's too late. Then your inputs are those metrics that drive the North Star. So what is it that determines your average speed? Maybe the favorability of the weather or the percent incline of the terrain. These are small but mighty indicators that will tell you whether you're on the right track to deliver your intended value, aka getting to the top. Again, they don't have to be scientific at this stage, just reasonable. If the terrain is getting steeper, you can reasonably assume it will impact your average speed and it might take you longer to reach your goal, which is the top of the mountain. So what would you change about your strategy in that case? Maybe you'd walk faster. Input metrics should guide your product strategy in the same way. And so when you frame this in your document, it might read something like this with some accompanying visuals. This product seeks to grow revenue for Google and increase earnings for target users. To drive these outcomes, we'll primarily seek to influence the percentage of users with verified skills on our platform, as inputs will focus on course completion rates and the percent growth in content producers and overall user engagement. And last but not least, your strategy. So this is incredibly important and also incredibly difficult to get 100% right in the early stages of a new product's life cycle. So I'm gonna help you focus on what matters here. Your goal in this section is to take your audacious vision for the future, break it down into an actionable, pragmatic plan. You don't have to plan for every single detail yet, but you should have a clear understanding of the major themes or pillars that make up your plan, what you're going to build and in what order. So your strategy or your plan is basically made up of three core parts. The first is your time horizon. Is this a multi-year journey? Are you expecting quick wins? That's something you need to explain to your reader. The second is your pillars or your themes. So a good way to think about this is if you had to land just three things to achieve your vision, what would those things be? And number three, what you're going to build and when. So what are your top priority feature sets and when can people expect them? So first you have to identify and then explain what your themes are. Again, these are your must have areas of investment. So in our learning example, we could assume that these are to create a thriving marketplace. We want to develop a best in class online learning experience. We're going to need to verify and recognize learner skills. That seems to be our differentiator. And then we want to do all of this on a scalable platform. So to elaborate on each theme, like the theme of creating a thriving marketplace, you need to break out each of those personas you mentioned, creators, learners, employers, help the reader get to know them, their needs and how they'll engage with what you're proposing. Readers need to know how you define a marketplace and what you think the ingredients of a successful marketplace are. So this is really your opportunity to take people with you, deep into your understanding of what the elements of your product solution are. Then you're going to explain what to expect when. So think of this as the overall arc of your plan and the major milestones through which it's going to unfold. So if you're answering the question, what would you like to be true at the end of each year of this journey, assuming it's a multi-year journey? Within each year, what are your major deliverables? So in the example on the right, this is what it might look like in your doc. So in 2022, we've established a strong platform foundation and a growing base of creators. And these are some prompts that can help you kind of flesh out what belongs in this section. So this year is going to be defined by, we need to do this and that in order to be successful and then list out what you're going to build in order. And again, these could be individual features, feature sets, and here I've included H1 and H2 to help people understand, is this the first or second half of the year that we're talking about? If the year itself doesn't align to when you're actually creating this document, you can just say year one, year two, year three, however far out you want to take this vision. All right, and then you're going to help readers understand the details and your intentions for each of those deliverables. So if you can't do that more than a year out, that's fine, provide detail where you have it. This should be directionally correct again, but as you start testing with users, the details are inevitably going to change. So just worry about being right enough to convince people that you have a plan. You don't have to go into detail for every year in your journey, but you should definitely have a concrete plan for the first half of the first year, ideally for the entire first year of your strategy proposal. So to recap what belongs in your strategy section as probably the densest and the longest section, you should set expectations about your time horizon over what period of time is this unfolding, list your must win areas, those three to five themes or pillars of your strategy. That explains the new capabilities you're proposing and then explain what you're building and when. So in 2023, for example, we'll introduce five key features and they are. So this is your plan to get us from point A, our current state to point B, the amazing future that you want to build. And that's it. It's a very quick drive-through of the core elements of a successful vision and strategy document. I've seen this format used successfully many times, including at Google. I hope you can adapt it and improve on it for your own vision and strategy. And just remember to simplify wherever you can. This should ultimately be a quick read. Use evidence wherever you can get it from all the research that went into formulating your deep understanding of this space. Use stories and narrative to inspire empathy for the user and check and double check for that through line, that connection between what you're proposing and what your company is actually in business to do. So I wish you the very best of luck. Thanks for having me today. It was really my pleasure and thanks everyone for joining. And let me know how it goes and how I can improve this presentation for other PMs. You can always find me on LinkedIn. Thank you.