Worst. Planning. Ever.
Fog shrouded the upper floors of a downtown San Francisco highrise. Inside, a product team sat in a conference room, their mood as gloomy as the summer weather blowing past the streaked picture window. On a clear day, the room looked out over a glorious view of The City’s Northwest corner, including the Presidio, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay, and the Marin Headlands beyond. As it was late May, those days were weeks, perhaps months away.
We chose the room because of its inspiring view. The inspiration would have benefited our current task, mapping the future of our product. As it was, we were stuck. Our usually cohesive unit was bickering, frustration growing as the conversation progressed. Constructive debate had long ago devolved into contentious arguments and threatened to turn caustic.
The team simply could not agree on which initiatives were most important, and each product manager had a pet project they believed was essential to our future success. As team members made their case, the difference between the products and their impact on customers became nearly indistinguishable.
As their leader, I had failed at the crucial task of setting our Purpose and creating the context for our ongoing debates. We had started with ‘how we will solve customer problems,’ so we lacked context, an organizing principle, and our Why. Without Purpose, we had no basis for comparing the relative importance of each product manager’s insistent pleas for preeminence.
I called the meeting. There was no sense in debating tactical priorities set against an opaque outcome. We agreed on some action items, and I retreated to lick my wounds, angry with myself and stung by failure. Our grand roadmap would have to wait.
Three things happened next.
First, I wrote what I believed was the product Vision and Strategy and assembled the team to debate and validate them. (Later, I would learn to write Vision and Strategy statements more collaboratively with my team.) From that meeting, a plan emerged to communicate constantly about the Vision and Strategy, so everyone would be on the same (okay, maybe just a similar) page when we resumed the roadmap discussion.
Second, I learned that planning is a continuous process, not an event. For a while, every Friday, we held a Vision/Strategy ‘Ask Me Anything’ forum. Anyone, even people outside of the product organization, could participate live or engage asynchronously through a chat channel. We kept at it until team members could reflexively repeat the Vision and Strategy.
Then, the roadmap conversation proceeded organically, without an elaborate multi-day meeting. Team members' conversations became more aligned and collaborative, and they frequently worked out that if Team A did Task 1 and Team B did Task 2, we would achieve Outcome Y, a milestone on the path to our Vision.
My role as chief roadmap adjudicator–which I passionately hated—quietly faded away. Instead, I could focus on aligning the team to our Purpose, establishing Why we were building our product, and crafting a Vision the market could believe in.
Function vs Purpose
In one of this newsletter’s first articles, Why bikes have brakes: A software development parable, I touched briefly on the concepts of Function and Purpose. It’s easy to confuse the two, and knowing the difference is essential to building products that matter.
The concept goes something like this: A bike’s Purpose is to go fast. So, what is the Purpose of the brakes? People usually answer that the brakes' Purpose is to stop the bike. But the brakes’ real Purpose is to help the bike go fast safely. The brakes’ Function is to stop the bike.
From there, it’s easy to work out how the brakes should perform that Function, for example, by applying friction to a rotating wheel so the rider can modulate speed.
Now, let’s explore the concepts of Purpose and Function in more detail, this time in the context of building your product’s Vision and Strategy.
Purpose and Vision
At the outset of any product journey, I recommend starting with a series of ‘Why” questions: Why this product? Why this market? Why your company? Why now? These are not questions with easy answers.
Call it what you like–Purpose, Mission, Northstar–the answers to these questions should guide all the subsequent decisions you make about your product's shape, color, and size. It’s easy to make assumptions about your customers, the market, and your capabilities, allowing you to skip this step. Setting your Purpose doesn’t guarantee success, but failing to do so can make your chances of success vanishingly small.
Your Vision articulates how your product’s Purpose evolves: here’s our product five years from now. Perhaps it doesn’t evolve significantly–your Purpose is always to make the world’s fastest bike. Maybe it does–your Purpose is to make the world’s fastest bike available to the everyday rider. This evolution may take years or even decades. Your Vision is the story you tell about the journey from your current state (strong, light, fabulously unaffordable) to your future state (strong, light, merely expensive).
On that summer day, my team couldn’t articulate our starting line or describe the journey to our promised land. We read from lists, invented justifications, and repeated recent conversations with various constituencies that proved each item's importance. No amount of pushing or shoving advanced a coherent narrative because we shared no anchor point, the place where the story began.
What we did next, focusing on Vision and Strategy, was better than bickering about features, and we saw a marked improvement once we aligned on our direction. A few months later, if you had asked the team Why we were headed in that direction, each member might have given you a very different answer.
While I privately pondered what needed to precede our Vision (It’s the Purpose, stupid!), we struck camp and started building the product Strategy.
Strategy and Function
Your Strategy describes how you will advance your Vision over the next 18-24 months. What initiatives will mold the product into the size, color, and shape that achieves the Vision? Break down those initiatives, sequence the work, and prioritize the effort, and you will have your roadmap.
Sounds easy enough, right?
A good Strategy clarifies which functions best serve your product’s Purpose and sets milestones to measure progress toward the Vision. Discovery, experimentation, and validation supply the signals used to know what best looks like and answer questions like, “We will know we are done when…”
My teams built features customers never used because they were orthogonal to the product’s overarching Purpose. Features missed the mark because their Function myopically focused on some narrow problem. We never stepped back to ask, “What Purpose does this feature serve?” We just chugged along, saying, “Make this feature perform Functions X, Y, and Z.”
In our world’s fastest bike example, the brakes' Purpose doesn’t change, but their Function—using hydraulics instead of wire cables–evolves substantially. Using hydraulics makes the brakes function better but adds weight and is more expensive. This Function misses the mark of fulfilling the Purpose (accessible to everyday riders) and Vision (lighter and cheaper).
Considered in isolation, however, there isn’t a strong counterargument against building the feature that improves the brakes. In fact, there is strong data to support doing it (braking is 30% more efficient!). Without knowing how the feature supports the overall Purpose, debating whether to build rests on intractability.
Intractable debates are the wellspring of contention. In that fog-shrouded conference room, my team was at each other’s throats through no fault of their own. I was compounding the situation by arbitrarily deciding the dispute. The hits to morale I inflicted that day took months to repair.
The Lesson
It took years of trial and error to understand the importance of Purpose, the difference between it and Function, and how to use both to build a coherent product strategy.
Like most junior product managers, I started with a string of features, wrote detailed PRDs, and filled backlogs with stories needing more context and relevance. Gradually, I understood that I needed a Strategy to help sequence and prioritize, but without a guiding Vision, those early Strategies were false Strategies. They had no anchor point. Eventually, I figured out that a Vision starting with a current state and arriving at a desired future state made the Strategy easier to work out.
Finally, I learned to begin with Purpose, to give the whole thing a strong anchor point.
I’m not sure setting a Purpose made the Vision-Strategy-Roadmap exercise easier, but it sure made it simpler.