I have a cunning plan.

My plan involves unifying the methods and tools that are successfully used by startups and scaleups with the principles and practices popularized by Lean and Agile communities. It includes upgrading the global Management 3.0 brand that I launched 10 years ago from just leadership practices to all areas of running a business. My plan is also about revolutionizing the way that people learn how to improve themselves and transform their organizations. At many points during the execution of this plan, I foresee travels, discussions, coffees, and lengthy rants on my social media accounts.

Then I hear the signal of our washing machine and I snap back to reality.

I was daydreaming again. What on Earth was I thinking? I cannot even get my startup team to stick to a plan. How am I going to get the rest of the world to pay attention to what I think is important? I’m not a coach or consultant. Helping other businesses to transform the way they work is not my job, nor my field of expertise. I’m just sharing my experiences while running my startups. I would be a terrible adviser. As I always say, I find my own problems much more interesting than those of other companies. And I have many!

It makes me feel like an imposter sometimes. The only thing I’m an expert at is learning tons of things that might help me solve my problems, and then sharing my insights publicly along the way. Fortunately, people seem to appreciate that. So I suppose there’s no need to feel too embarrassed when I get things wrong occasionally. As long as I shout it loud and clear, “I learned something new!” The audience is welcome to learn along with me.

It’s a Sunday today. It’s the best day for some reflection, except when the washing machine keeps beeping. What a horrible thing.

This book is nearly finished. I’m glad I decided to write it. I learned so much this past year from all the research that I performed and all the interviews that I did all over Europe. I’m convinced that my business is better off now because of the many things I picked up that we could implement right away. I might even suggest that all startup founders write their own books. I would read them for sure.

It’s quite a busy Sunday, actually. Apart from finishing and reflecting on the book, I have more work to do for the launch of our team’s next crowdfunding round, which, quite miraculously, starts the day after I have sent the manuscript of this book to the publisher. It also seems that quite a few people are waiting to hear about my new Shiftup workshop program, for which I will use the ideas that I had while writing this book. Maybe I can do some thinking on that tonight, after a bike ride in the forest.

Oh, forget it. There is no cunning plan.

I’m just winging it, like most other founders, entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, and business leaders. I try a thousand things, and a dozen of them seem to work. That’s how I’m more successful than some other people because they often try nothing. If there’s one thing that I learned over the past 20 years, it’s to fail often and fail small. That’s how founders and leaders do many things, of which a few will be a great success. This book is just one of many things.

Now for heaven’s sake, which product designer thought it was a great idea to let a washing machine keep beeping?

 

 

Many of us are visionaries. As entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, founders, leaders, and creatives, we envision things that do not yet exist. We want those things to become real.

For example:

Wouldn’t it be great if there were no bad jobs, no bad managers, and no bad companies? Wouldn’t it be awesome if everything we knew about doing better work was somehow stored in data and algorithms in such a way that machines helped us to improve our organizations? Wouldn’t it be great if, someday in the not-so-far future, rather than us telling computers how to do mindless work, they helped us do meaningful work?

Someday, machines will understand how teams of people do their best work together. They will offer us suggestions, such as, “You might want to clean up your product backlog after yesterday’s customer demo”; and “This was your 500th daily cafe. How about celebrating it? I have an idea for you to surprise your team”; and “Hey, your last agile retrospective was six weeks ago. Here is a new retro exercise that’s popular right now in your industry.”

 

Who needs managers watching over people’s shoulders when artificial intelligence will be able to help teams to hire people, guide performance, and achieve organizational change? A smart business is the kind of company I want my startup to be! Everyone loving their jobs. Everyone trying to make things better. And intelligent machines helping us to improve our work. As far as I know, machine learning algorithms have no interest in the top floor corner office, a limousine with driver, or the parking space next to the office entrance. We would save tons of money on management perks, bonuses, and printed 
PowerPoint slide decks!

What I just described is only a vision. But it’s a nice one. I believe that innovation often starts with visionaries.

As an entrepreneur, intrapreneur, founder, leader, or creative, you need a Product Vision. It describes the essence of an innovative product: what it aims to achieve for its users and customers. A great Product Vision helps people to mentally visualize what value should be delivered, as if they’re hearing a short story about a successful business in the future.

 

Michał Borkowski, founder and CEO of Brainly, had a few minutes to spare for me at Brainly’s office in Kraków, Poland. The company was growing so fast, they literally occupied a temporary office in between their old and new offices.

We defined the opportunity ahead of us in a way that scales globally. There are 1.2 billion students in the world and every student needs help learning every day. If we think about the problem that Brainly is solving, it’s that big problem. Quite often, what I see is that the problems that startups are trying to solve are not big enough. They are chasing an opportunity that is way smaller than the real opportunity that is ahead of them. It was the same for us early on. We started in Poland. We were initially not thinking about our global opportunity. We were just thinking about our own country. It took us about three years to really figure out why we are here and what we are trying to achieve. Now that it’s clearly defined, it helps me to manage the company towards that vision. I would encourage every startup founder and CEO to think about their big vision way earlier than we have done.

Michał Borkowski, founder and CEO of Brainly, Kraków, Poland

 

The reason that we craft a vision is to have a direction in which to navigate with our team’s product development efforts. We can dream our dreams and then formulate a vision without knowing anything about available technologies, markets, or revenue streams. We figure out the details later. The first thing we need to do is to inspire ourselves and our cofounders, if we have them, our first team members, if we want them, and any investors, if we need them. Without the inspiration of the people around us, nobody will care about figuring out the details of how to get there. Without a vision, there probably won’t be a realization of the dream.

Don’t confuse a Product Vision with a strategic plan. Sharing a dream with your team is not about a list of features on a Product Roadmap. A vision is not a carefully crafted statement concocted by a committee on a two-day retreat in a wellness resort. A vision is not the slogan on a mug filled with a cappuccino that was excreted from a push-button machine. Instead, your vision is a verbal image of the future, in language that you would use when you told your story in a bar, to convince your friends to help you make things happen. And the vision is big, bold, and compelling. I have a dream comes before I have a team. It is what separates the great leaders from the failed ones.

Marc Wesselink, managing partner at Startupbootcamp, spoke enthusiastically across the large table of the shared meeting room in Amsterdam. The building was full of startups and, what seemed to me, a well-organized creative chaos.

When I look at all the dozens or hundreds of startups that went by, the great ones have something that the others don’t. There is one thing that makes all the difference. The best founders have a True North. They have some sort of clock ticking in them that they want to solve a huge problem. But then, in what way and how and to which customers, that’s not certain yet. They are willing to be flexible, as long as they can make progress toward their vision. That’s, by far, the biggest differentiator.

Marc Wesselink, managing partner at Startupbootcamp, 
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

 

I think Marc is correct. And not only for startups, the small companies that are trying to prove that their new product idea is viable. It is also true for scaleups, the successful companies with validated business models that are scaling out to more markets and more products. It is true for established companies, whose leaders and intrapreneurs are trying to transform and reinvent their organizations so that they are not outmaneuvered and replaced by the startups and the scaleups.

An often-heard complaint about management in mature organizations is the lack of a clear direction. Employees are all busy selling products and services, but nobody knows where the company is heading. None of the workers feel inspired by a dream for a better future. To address this concern, the business leaders of traditional companies need to communicate a shared vision. And they need to do so consistently and persistently. It makes a huge difference to the creativity, collaboration, and commitment of teams when they are shown a big, bold dream. This enables them to envision the future results of their work. Nobody dreams about ordinary product features, unless they are nightmares. But imagining how the world is going to change in the future, and how the work that they’re doing is contributing to that future, that is worth dreaming about. People need to say, “If that’s going to be possible soon, count me in. I want to make it happen!”

I tried not to make a mess of my wet tea bag on a large, black table somewhere in Helsinki, Finland, while Jenni Tolonen explained to me the original vision of the company Management Events, of which she is now the CEO.

Our founder wanted us to help Finnish people be more social at business-to-business events and bring them together. In today’s very digital world, if the face-to-face contacts are well-facilitated and they are matched around common interests, and the environment is fun and engaging, people can generate good business. They can make new contacts. They can get new ideas. Maybe they even get their problems solved. That’s what our founder wanted, so that’s where our vision lies. And we’re happy that we have made good progress toward that vision.

Jenni Tolonen, CEO at Management Events, Helsinki, Finland

 

At the risk of sounding like a pedantic hairsplitter—which I probably am—I think what Jenni referred to was originally a company vision and then became a company purpose or mission. The company has already achieved what it set out to do. They have realized their dream and now they want to do more of it. Following commonly accepted definitions, a company’s purpose (sometimes referred to as its mission) is about the present. It explains why it does the things it does. A vision is about the future. It explains the lofty goal the organization hopes to achieve. Having a purpose is about being meaningful; having a vision is about being hopeful. Mission is push. Vision is pull. And that’s as far as I will go with the pedantic hairsplitting.

An inspiring example of a vision is The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit organization headquartered in my hometown, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. With passive drifting systems and advanced technologies, and by using the natural currents of the oceans, this organization wants to clean up half the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in just five years’ time. At the time of writing, the company claims to be ahead of schedule. The 24-year-old Boyan Slat, founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup, considered his vision so important that he turned it into the company’s name!

One of the many reasons why companies fail and screw up is a lack of passion or commitment of the leaders to solve a certain problem. The business drifts to the left, and then it drifts to the right; maybe it even goes in circles. The company is like a garbage patch waiting to be cleaned up by a passionate young founder. Don’t let that happen to you. Start visioning!

What is your dream? What do you care about deeply? Which vision do you want to make real? It doesn’t have to be something that grabs headlines all over the world, such as cleaning up the oceans. Other problems are more important, 
perhaps for a smaller number of people. Your Product Vision should be simple enough for people to visualize, understand, and repeat to each other in your absence. 
No jargon. No buzzword bingo. No 
long, complicated sentences. Just a vivid, mental picture of something that could become true in the future, communicated with clarity and persistence.

 

I dream of computers helping us to create better work and better organizations. It is my vision of a better world. Happier workers through better technologies. Product Visions fit well in what I call the Initiation stage of the Shiftup Business Lifecycle. I will tell you more about that soon. All in good time. There is a lot of ground to cover in this book. Let’s start with a founder story.

 

For related notes, articles, books, examples, and downloads, check out this web page: 
https://startup-scaleup-screwup.com/product-vision.