How Will a Product Vision Help You Succeed?

Dozens of individuals receive training to become Certified Scrum Product Owners at our public learning events in Toronto, Ontario.

What is a Product Owner? And how do they create a product vision in alignment with the team they work with? Xi Zeng, over at 3 Agile Guys blog, has some ideas worth sharing.

Here is an excerpt from his article on product vision.

How can a product vision help you?

A project always has a predefined scope and goals, therefore defining a vision for a project is in most of the cases not really necessary. A product has usually a much bigger scope and a longer life cycle, so it’s important to create a product vision in advance in order to:

• help the business define requirements
• be able to evaluate the value of the project
• simplify the communication among the organisation (or with clients)
• act as project’s compass
• support the prioritization and decision-making in projects

The vision should consider the long term life cycle of the product and should not be easily reachable. Define even a vision that is almost impossible to reach. All short term goals should be clear defined and measurable, e.g. what is the next step in the project, next valuable goal, how to prioritize work items in backlog, etc. But the vision represents the long term future, it should stay ambitious. Just like when you’re hiking on the mountains, you can see the rocks under your feet, you know their size and form, you can touch them and even pick them up. But you can only see roughly where is the top of the mountain. While hiking, reaching the top of the mountain is our vision.

I think there is a lot of value in what Xi writes and it is worth exploring in greater depth.

by Rachel Perry