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
A story on the importance of business strategy towards constructing product vision and strategy. Jeff joined Webaan, an early-stage startup from an MNC, to lead Webaan’s product agenda. Webaan was a B2B SaaS startup focused on web analytics. Since this was a big role transition, he decided to approach this with an
Looking into multiple vision statements, I realize that there are only two broad possibilities (and a combination of these two) to define your product vision. One is Customer value/experience (what the product delivers) and the other is the platform (what the product becomes). In detail: Customer Value/Experience: Your vision is expressed directly
This is the first post on ‘Product vision’ under the Product Leadership series. Product Leaders & PMs write product vision statements for a variety of reasons – to inspire teams, to provide a sense of direction, and to ease decision-making at all levels. But what does a product vision mean for a
After reading my previous post, a budding product leader pinged me, “Venkat if I have to follow your advice, I would have to start spending more than 50% of my time on stakeholder management”. This was her reaction to my last post on a framework for stakeholder management (article link in the
Why this post? While transitioning from an individual contributor to a leadership role, your perspective would change from “How do I make an impact?”, “how do I leverage others’ expertise to make an outsized impact?”. So, at leadership levels, the importance of stakeholders increases multifold. Given this importance, a leader needs to
Aarti joined Bell Technologies, a fast-growing startup as a Group PM to lead customer experience. In her role, she had to deal with Karan, a tough stakeholder. Karan used to challenge Aarti by constantly questioning her approach, priorities, and decisions. Aarti initially took everything at face value and kept answering his questions,
Bhavna, the Director of products, is having a tough time with Kishore, her engineering counterpart. Whenever a project or a feature is lined up, the first thing you hear Kishore say is ‘No, we can’t take up this feature’. Kishore is a veteran engineering manager with Enterprise products background. He often tries
Ravi joins Blee-blee as VP, Products. Blee-blee is a publicly-traded company and a market leader in one of the SaaS spaces. Ravi was hired to drive a product-driven culture in a traditionally sales-driven company. On the day of joining, the CEO recommended to Ravi – “Spend time understanding the journey the company
Pravir was hired by the CEO of Duck-duck Technologies to lead new initiatives. Duck-duck is a leader in the food-delivery space with a good product-market fit but still not fully profitable. The CEO and the board saw opportunities beyond food delivery. They wanted to make big bets on adjacent spaces. The startup
