How to Define Product Vision and Strategy When You’re New to the Product

Joining a new product team and defining a product vision and strategy from scratch can feel daunting, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the product.

Within just two months of joining a new team, I managed to define the product vision, identify three key pillars, and establish goals and initiatives. Here’s how I approached it and how you can too.

Step 1: Get to Know the Team

Your product vision and strategy can’t be formed in isolation — it’s a team effort. The first thing I did was build relationships with the key people in the team, particularly the engineering lead and the UX designer. These roles often have invaluable insights into both the technical and user experience aspects of the product, helping you understand the history and current status.

• Why the Engineering Lead? They can provide deep knowledge about the technical foundations of the product, challenges, and upcoming technical initiatives.
• Why the UX Designer? They help you understand the user journey, design constraints, and any customer pain points that have been identified through research.

Step 2: Dive into the Product

It’s essential to immerse yourself in the product. Access it, use it, and explore every feature. It’s impossible to define a vision for something you don’t deeply understand. Get hands-on experience to discover both the strengths and weaknesses of the product. This will give you context when you’re thinking about what the product should become.

Step 3: Understand the Organization’s Strategy

The product strategy must align with the organizational broader business and technical strategy. Before you start formulating your product vision, ensure you have a comprehensive understanding of the company’s goals.

• Business Strategy: Meet with the head of product or the strategy team lead to learn about the organization’s business goals and their expectations for your product. Understanding the organization’s broader objectives will help you shape a product vision that aligns with business needs.
• UX Design Challenges: Speak to the UX lead and the UX designer to understand any design-related challenges or user experience pain points. What have customers said? What’s been tried in the past? What are the current design constraints?
• Technical Strategy: Connect with the Engineering Director to understand the technical vision, current architecture, and long-term expectations from a technical perspective. Aligning your product vision with the technical strategy will ensure feasibility and buy-in from the engineering team.

Step 4: Draft the Vision Early

Don’t wait too long to start crafting your vision. While it doesn’t need to be perfect right away, getting an early draft out there is crucial. Share it with your UX designer and engineering manager for feedback. Their input will help refine your thinking and ensure alignment between the product, user experience, and technology.

Step 5: Present to the Team for Feedback

Once you’ve refined your vision, present it to the entire engineering team. This will not only give you valuable feedback but also help foster a sense of ownership among the team. It’s important to let everyone feel like they’re part of the vision-creation process.

Step 6: Roadshow to Senior Management

With feedback from your team, you’re ready to bring your vision to the next level. Present your draft vision to senior managers to get their insights. This can also help you secure buy-in and support for the strategy at higher organisational levels.

The six steps outlined above serve as a roadmap for defining a product vision and strategy. Now, let’s dive into the practical application.

Leveraging What You Already Have for Product Vision

If you’re stepping into an existing product, don’t overlook what’s already been accomplished. Here’s a strategic approach to defining a vision for a product you’ve inherited:

1. Map out the Current State: Before shaping the future, understand what you already have. Take stock of the features that have been built and review the current product roadmap to see what’s planned.
2. Group and Categorize Features: Once you’ve mapped everything, group features or initiatives into meaningful categories. Think about what each group represents.
3. Identify Key Pillars: The groupings you’ve created can potentially serve as pillars for your product. These pillars will support your overall vision, linking past work with future aspirations. Ensure that each group is given a clear and meaningful name to represent its purpose.
4. Draft the Vision with Alignment to Strategy: With your understanding of the business and technical strategies, draft your initial product vision. Even if it’s rough, you’ll have the foundation to build upon. Tools like ChatGPT can even help structure your vision!

Defining the Strategy

Product strategy is often a combination of goals and initiatives. I find it helpful to link the vision to goals and then break those goals down into actionable initiatives, which become epics on your product roadmap.

1. Define Goals from Each Pillar’s Perspective: Using the pillars you’ve identified, think of goals that align with each one. These goals should tie back to the product vision and serve as stepping stones toward achieving it.
2. Create Initiatives (Themes or Epics): Initiatives are the specific projects or epics that will help you achieve your goals. These should be outlined on your roadmap and linked to both the vision and goals to ensure alignment.

Example: Vision and Strategy in Action

Let’s say you’ve inherited a product for online learning. After diving into the product, you discover three key pillars:

1. Personalized Learning Experience
2. Seamless Course Access
3. Scalable Technology Infrastructure

Product Vision:

“To provide a personalized, user-friendly platform that empowers learners with seamless access to educational resources while ensuring scalable, future-proof technology for continuous innovation.”

Goals:

• Personalized Learning Experience: Increase learner engagement by offering customized course recommendations.
• Seamless Course Access: Ensure 99.9% uptime and fast load times to make course access frictionless for users.
• Scalable Technology Infrastructure: Upgrade backend systems to handle a 2x increase in user traffic over the next 12 months.

Initiatives:

• Implement a recommendation engine for personalized learning (epic).
• Migrate the platform to cloud infrastructure to improve scalability and reliability (epic).
• Optimize front-end design for quicker access to courses (epic).

In this example, the pillars serve as the foundation of the vision, and the strategy links each goal to specific initiatives on the product roadmap. This approach not only ensures alignment but also provides clear, actionable steps toward realizing the product vision.

This is just one example of defining a product vision and strategy. Feel free to share your thoughts or approaches — I’d love to hear your ideas!