A typical scenario that plays out when disseminating Product vision within the company:
Product leader unveils the vision in a town hall or a large gathering of employees.
He/she shares compelling stories and memorable sound bites.
The leader gets applauded
A few weeks later, while conversing with a few employees, he/she realizes that many of them (outside the product team) don’t remember what the vision is and a few others haven’t understood the vision as it was meant to be.
It feels like a big waste of time. The irony is that the product leader had accelerated developing & sharing the vision because there were murmurs within the company that the product vision has not been published yet. But when it got published, people were not paying enough attention it deserves.
What went wrong?
There could be multiple reasons including the need to refine the messaging better and make it relatable. But the biggest reason is that remembering and meditating over the product vision is not anyone’s primary goal (other than PMs). Everyone is busy with their day-to-day tasks that the big picture gets lost very quickly.
How to solve this? Repetition
In advertising, studies show that a customer needs to be exposed to an ad or a message 7 times to have the desired effect (aka ‘The rule of seven’). Luckily, for evangelizing a product vision, the number is very small (3 or 4 times is good, I think) since vision is still a very relevant message, unlike a random ad.
So, a product leader needs to use multiple opportunities/channels to reinforce the vision to different teams within the company. These opportunities could be meetings, reviews, brown bag sessions, mass mailers, slack channels, etc.
And when do you stop this evangelizing exercise? When you start hearing questions, clarifications, and even disagreements. That is when you can be sure that the vision has percolated within the organization.
And you repeat the same once in a few months to keep the message reinforced.
What challenges have you faced in disseminating product vision within your organization? Let me know
