Landis Product Leader on Selling the Vision to Grow and Align Teams

The product vision is one of the vaguest yet most powerful tools in a PM’s toolbox. A clear and compelling product vision is essential for aligning teams to a shared purpose. How do you create a vision that is compelling enough to stick in people’s heads? Landis Head of Product Vinamrata Singal shares how to craft your vision to appeal to different audiences.

Join us for new conversations with leading product executives every week. Roll through the highlights of this week’s event below, then head on over to our Events page to see which product leaders will be joining us next week.

Join us at our weekly Speaker Series events to engage with product leaders in your own community and gain insights on how to accelerate digital transformation.

On Elements of A Sellable Vision

Vinamrata shared three tangible elements of a sellable vision and broke down each one for the audience.

“Before you go off and construct a product vision, you need what I like to call kindling. The kindling is the customer insight or observation.”

“It comes from talking to your customers, looking into your data, understanding how customers use your product, and understanding your competition. And understanding the ways in which your customers view your competition.”

“These are the three elements of a sellable vision. First is clarity through specificity. Helping people really visualize and very clearly articulate the customer and their problem. The second is compelling people through uniqueness. Helping people understand and see the value proposition. Finally, galvanizing through open space. Getting people really riled up about your vision by helping them see the vastness of the vision, where they fit in, and how they can be part of pushing the vision forward.”

On Execute the Elements of a Vision

Vinamrata then described some ways each of these elements can be executed through questions and areas to explore to really dial into that vision. 

“The first [element] is clarity through specificity. Who is your customer as a real person? What did their problems look like in their life as it relates to their product, or even just like within their life in general? What impact is your product aspire to have on their lives?

“The next element is compelling through uniqueness. It really comes down to what’s a unique observation or insight that you have about your customer that you can leverage to build solutions for them. 

“Finally, there’s the galvanizing through open space piece. You want to give some level of guidance so that it’s not totally open with no guardrails where anyone can do anything. At the same time, you also don’t want to be telling people what they should be doing at any given point. It’s really about striking that balance between giving enough guardrails but not being overly prescriptive.”

On Vision In Action

In this portion of the webinar, Vinamrata shared a vision in action by penning two hypothetical visions, using Airbnb as an example. In the first one, the audience said it wasn’t great. 

“The first one is that there’s a lot of details that aren’t really tied to understanding Nina, in this case, our customer, as a person or motivations. “

“The second is that no clear unique insight connects to a deeper motivation. There are no unique insights into why people travel.”

“Finally, it’s too prescriptive. We need more open space. It talks about building like a search engine and filters like that’s too specific at this level of a vision.”