RAFFIAPALM

Resources for product teams from industry experts.

The Five Qualities of Good Visions

Because everything derives from the high-level vision, the team’s overall leader should invest more energy in it than any other early planning material. The five most important characteristics are: simplifying, intentional (goal-driven), consolidated, inspirational, and memorable.

— Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management by Scott Berkun

Source: Amazon Kindle

Related Stories and Excerpts:

  1. Winning over one or two customers in each of five or ten different segments—the consequence of taking a sales-driven approach—will create no word-of-mouth effect. Your customers may try to start a conversation about you, but there will be no one there to reinforce it. By contrast, winning four or five customers in one segment will create the desired effect. Thus, the segment-targeting company can expect word-of-mouth leverage early in its crossing-the-chasm marketing effort, whereas the sales-driven company will get it much later, if at all. This lack of word of mouth, in turn, makes selling the product that much […]
  2. At its simplest, a strategy is a plan for achieving a goal — a bird’s-eye view of the path that will take us from where we are now to where we want to go. It’s important to understand the distinction between strategy and tactics if we’re to elevate ‘story’ in our organisations and use it as more than just a communications tool. If a strategy is the path to your goal, tactics are the specific steps you take as you navigate that path. Imagine your business purpose and vision as a mountain peak. Your strategy is the route map […]
  3. Our project in the years to come will be to advance a positive vision of what liberal democracy can deliver with the new tools that technology is placing at our disposal. Its pillars must be: Broadly shared prosperity. Democratic accountability. Scientific inquiry and truth-telling. Long-term thinking. Universal entrepreneurial opportunity. Profound investment in the public goods that benefit everyone: basic science, R&D, education, health care, infrastructure. We must be guided by real research into which solutions are likely to work for society’s greater good. We must harness all of the tools of human culture and creativity to this vision: the […]
  4. Work for goals that you and your organization are excited about and think about how your tasks connect to those goals. If you’re focused on the goal, excited about achieving it, and recognize that doing some undesirable tasks to achieve the goal is required, you will have the right perspective and will be appropriately motivated. If you’re not excited about the goal that you’re working for, stop working for it. Personally, I like visualizing exciting new and beautiful things that I want to make into realities. The excitement of visualizing these ideas and my desire to build them out […]
  5. The product vision is what drives and inspires the company and sustains the company through the ups and downs. This may sound straightforward, but it’s tricky. That’s because there are two very different types of product leaders needed for two very different situations: Where there is a CEO or a founder who is the clear product visionary Where there is no clear product visionary—usually in situations where the founder has moved on There are two very bad situations you may encounter related to product vision and strategy. The first is when you have a CEO who is very strong […]

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