Envision neon lights
Last week I sat through the ProductCon virtual conference. Listening to Ebi Atawodi discuss how she creates great product visions. This vision, she explains, is lofty and almost untouchable today. It's not locked into current constraints or problems easily solved right now. It's long-term. Years in the future. And everything you build is built with that vision in mind. Early in my career, I used to think product visions were fluff. Unnecessary words muckity-mucks used to sound visionary. WRONG, bad Dani. Watching places work without a clear vision you can see how quickly a roadmap can get out of hand without one. Entire departments all rowing in every direction because they don't have that north star to shoot for.
ITSM with an easy button
A couple of years ago at Cherwell, we had been on a steady climb in the market. We produced ITSM (information technology service management) software. The thing you log a ticket through at work when your laptop breaks. ServiceNow was the clear market leader with more than 50% ownership. We were a very distant 3rd in the market. So how does David pick away at Goliath? We were growing, but we wanted to leapfrog what other products were doing. So our vision became ITSM with an easy button. Something that would set us apart from other players.
If you've ever run headlong into ITIL(Information Technology Infrastructure Library) you know how complex incident management and more particularly change management can be. Most ITSM products had a dated look to them. They were clunky to use and even worse on mobile if they worked at all. And were a pain to set up workflows in. Our product included. So the term "easy button" became the driver behind everything we did. Starting small we looked at the UI/UX of all our interfaces. We hired a firm to consult in the initial redesign and then I worked to build out our UX team internally. I then created a space for that team to work in that was wall-to-wall whiteboard paint. We took the mockups created by that firm and started looking at each piece and what projects we'd need to build out. Those mocks inspired even more ideas like "users want to build a dashboard", well how easy is that to do in our product? Do our widgets support drag and drop, are themes easy to create and manage, does it adapt to various screen sizes? Can they build one thing on the desktop and see it the same way on mobile?
Armed with a stack of sticky notes, sharpies, and whiteboard markers we spent hours in that room noting all the projects on those mocks as well as the other ideas spawned from them. We then broke those projects down into "what has to happen right now", "what comes next", and "next level". The baseline was an adaptable interface that worked on any screen with a modern look. The next projects were things like the dashboard builder, major quality of life improvements that really filled in the "easy button" vision. The next level category had things like AI and machine learning capabilities. Beyond our reach when we first started, but maybe a year or more down the road we could actually achieve. This was our long-term roadmap.
Maybe we could alert a service desk agent of important tickets through Slack or maybe our tool could even handle automating actions. Say a new hire ticket gets put into the system, depending on the department and role our software would spawn all the other necessary tickets required for a laptop that suits that role, an HR ticket to get them into the payroll system, and maybe a facilities ticket for a desk setup optimized for that job. No service desk agent required. Eventually, it could even suggest things to automate from now on and set that up itself. Service desk agents are busy, anything that enabled them to be more efficient was a huge win.
All those things were years worth of development work and it took them years to build most of that. Some ideas we had never made it into the product. Some didn't turn out how we originally envisioned due to technical constraints, time, or evolving business and customer needs. But the ultimate vision was realized. Build the easy button for ITSM. And with most visions, there is always more you can do. The point is to give your teams that north star. That one direction that everything you do is challenged against. "Does this make the product easier to use?".
the vision is something you should talk about often
Like Ebi notes, the vision is something you should talk about often. It should permeate all levels of the business and every project should be tested against it. Your development time is precious. Your teams should not be wasted building things that don't ultimately help you reach your end goal. Defining a vision also helps frame innovation, gives your idea people something to innovate against.
Does your product have a vision? How has that influenced your roadmap and what you build? Have you worked without one, and how did that affect your product? As always, thanks for reading! I really enjoy sharing my neon product dreams with you.
