How To Use The Product Vision Statement As A Compass For Your Roadmap

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Hannah Clark: Pop quiz, no cheating: what's your product's vision statement? If it didn't come to mind right away, you're likely part of the majority of companies that have treated their vision statements as one off exercises. A moment of feel good back padding that promptly gets lost in the abyss of backlog items.

Why do so many of us relate to this? Because caring about the vision is usually seen as someone else's job. And if that's the case, and you still have to look it up on your company's about page, how do we know what we're actually working toward? 

Today is part one of my two part conversation with Radhika Dutt. She's an entrepreneur, product leader, speaker, blogger, author of Radical Product Thinking, and creator of several training courses for radical product managers. In part one, we discussed how most vision statements are a diamond in the rough, with the potential to be a tool that flattens barriers, guides innovation, and aligns cross functional teams. Let's jump in. 

Radhika, thank you so much for joining us. 

Radhika Dutt: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. 

Hannah Clark: Us too. So I guess we should start the way we always start and we'll talk a little bit about you and your background. How did you get to be where you are in your career, Radhika?

Radhika Dutt: It's been a long and meandering path for me getting to this point.

I started as an entrepreneur and in fact, the first startup that I started was right out of our dorm rooms at MIT. And that startup, we had a big vision. It was five of us co-founders. And our vision was to revolutionize wireless, and this was back in 2000. And if you ask me, what did we mean by revolutionizing wireless?

We didn't really know. All we knew is that we wanted it to be big. And this is a disease that I have since learned is common in the startup world, this desire to be big, but without really knowing what is it that you want to solve in the first place. And so I call that "hero syndrome". So we had caught hero syndrome and that was my, first foray into entrepreneurship and building products.

But after that, I went to build other startups or I went to larger organizations. And, my background has been that I've never held two consecutive jobs in the same industry. So I've worked in broadcast media and entertainment telecom, advertising, robotics, even wine. And along this meandering path, what I found was the theme of product diseases just kept coming up over and over. That no matter what kind of a company I worked in, whether it was a startup or a multinational, that there were always the same set of product diseases that kept coming up.

And it was a bunch of seven diseases that I write about in the book. So what led me to Radical Product Thinking was this burning question of, is it that we were all just doomed to learn through trial and error and catching these product diseases? Or is there a step by step approach that we can take so that anyone can learn to build products systematically?

Because we seem to have this myth that, only people like Steve Jobs and, those who worship Elon Musk will feel like he belongs in that category who can build, these amazing world changing products and everyone else is set to just follow along. But you know, what if each of us instead could build better products, but done in a really systematic approach?

And that's what Radical Product Thinking is about. It's about giving everyone the step by step approach. 

Hannah Clark: I'm really fascinated with this train of thought, but I want to recap a little bit about the product diseases and what you mean by that. Can you recap briefly what those diseases are?

Radhika Dutt: Yeah. So we talked about hero syndrome, but let me give you a couple of other examples. One example in a sales led company is the disease obsessive sales disorder, right? And this happens when your sales person comes to you with a glimmer in their eyes saying, Joe, if you just add this one custom feature, we can win this mega client.

And you don't even have to turn this feature on for others, just this one customer. And pretty soon, that sounds harmless, so we say 'yes'. And you're sitting with a stack of contracts at the end of the year and your entire roadmap is driven by everything that you have to make good on. So that's obsessive sales disorder.

One example of a disease in an engineering led organization is narcissist complex. We get so enamored with the shiny thing we've built. We look inwards and we're just in love with the shiny thing we've built. And we think, well, if we love this, anyone else is going to love it too. And that's narcissist complex.

But there are so many other such diseases. Oh, one that is, I think, super common, both in startups, but even in large companies is the disease pivotitis, right? Where we keep pivoting from one thing to the next. And this always leads to the question, wait a minute, does that mean you're saying you should not pivot?

And the answer to that is, it's not that you shouldn't pivot, but every pivot you have to think of it like a silver bullet. You have literally two to three pivots before you run out of either money or momentum. And so the question is, if you're building a product really systematically, how can you use those pivots like silver bullets and be very deliberate about them as opposed to catching pivotitis?

Hannah Clark: Okay. So we'll get back to our conversation. So back to this burning question, are we doomed to stick to trial and error or is there a systematic approach we can leverage to sort of democratize better products?

Radhika Dutt: We aren't doomed to trial and error, but in fact, what media and what the startup world tells us is that the way to build products is through trial and error.

We keep hearing that the mantras for building products are, you have to iterate quickly, fail fast, learn fast, build, test, learn, scale. It's all about just try things through iteration and then see what works. That's the first misconception that we have to shed. Once you've shed that, the question then is, okay, so what do you do instead?

And the answer to that is a systematic approach means starting with thinking through what is the problem that you're setting out to solve? Creating a clear vision for what is the problem that you see out there that needs to be solved? Why does it need to be solved? And how are you going to solve it?

And in the Radical Product Thinking way, we created this fill-in-the-blank statement for writing such a vision. Why you'd say? Well, you know, I've always struggled with writing vision statements. And I think most of us have, right? What we've learned about vision statements is they have to be big, broad, aspirational.

What I've realized in my career is such an aspirational, big, broad statement that's supposed to be unchanging actually turns out to be completely useless. Because if it's unchanging and your entire market is shifting from under you, your customers are changing, et cetera, like how can your vision stay the same?

And so what we realized was we needed to give people a better approach to writing a vision. And so a good vision, instead of it being this slogan that's short and memorable, it turns out that we actually have to write something that's detailed. And it must answer the following five questions: the who, what, why, when, and how - meaning whose world are we setting out to change?

And it's not everyone's. What exactly is their problem and how are they solving it today? The third question is probably the most important to me, which is, why does that problem need to be solved? Because maybe it doesn't actually need to be solved. And by the way, when sometimes that problem doesn't need to be solved, the way we try to get traction for our product is through hooks and things that are addictive. But it's missing that basic question of why should you be solving it?

Why are you needing to create hooks? Maybe the first two problems are not answered well enough. Then once you've answered these three, you can answer the fourth, which is when can you say mission accomplished? Meaning when will you know that you've arrived? This is where you can finally talk about your product and say, how is your product going to bring this about?

So you'll notice that until that last question, your product doesn't even feature in your vision. It's really not even about you. It's about the problem that needs to be solved. So that is the starting point of radical product thinking so that you can be vision-driven. Next, you can use the other four elements, which is translating that into a strategy, which is an actionable set of steps.

Then into a set of priorities and how do you bring this vision into your everyday actions? Then into hypothesis-driven execution and measurement. And finally, using all of these concepts to engineer the culture that you want to bring to your team. 

Hannah Clark: So I could see this being a lot more easy to do if you are in control of your product and you're a startup founder. How does this translate to somebody who's working in an organization where they're entering in and need to get buy in from other stakeholders? 

Radhika Dutt: Great question. And I don't want it to seem like only startup founders can use this or leaders of organizations. And that's another myth that exists, right, which is perpetuated. I'll say my toxic masculinity. The idea is that there's someone at the top and everyone else is following along. And this myth has been perpetuated where we keep thinking that it's that person at the top who has the vision and everyone else, we're all just followers. 

But in reality, it's not just that one person's vision that makes that vision come alive. The reality is that every person who is working on this product needs to make that vision their own and translate that vision into their own actions. So that is one way where, first of all, we realized that it's not just about this vision of the top.

But ask yourself then, what is that vision at the top mean for you and how you translate that into your work? What is your vision for your work that's contributing to the change you want to bring about, that you collectively want to bring about? That's one question. The second thing I'll say is, and this is the experience I've had as a product manager, where I was working in a company where that company leadership didn't necessarily have a good vision.

In fact, there was so much confusion about what are we going for? But you can see this almost as an opportunity for yourself. When a team desperately needs someone to give them a vision, you can be that person to create that vision for the team. What was interesting as a result of having this clarity of vision and strategy that I was able to give to the team, it became that, within this organization, we had two sets of cultures. 

There was the culture at the leadership level, which was a bit confusing for everyone. And then there was a culture within our team where there was so much clarity. And the kind of epitome of this was one day when I had written up a user story and the developer came to me and said, I understand what you've written in the user story, but I just want to ask you, like, from what I understand of where we're going, what you actually want as an end result and an outcome, like your intent is this, right?

And in which case can I change the user story to be the following? And she was right. Like that was exactly the case. When you are able to present such clarity to your team in terms of vision and strategy, that your developers are able to correct you, meaning if you can make yourself redundant, then you've achieved as a product person, for example. Or you can say this about any role.

If you're able to communicate your rationale and your approach with that level of clarity, that your direction is no longer needed and people are thinking like you would, then you've scaled your leadership and that's after all our ultimate goal. 

Hannah Clark: I'm in awe. That's such a brilliant way to bring that home and to explain and work with teams in such a way that they're almost self guided. What are some of the complexities involved in advocating for your own vision as a woman of color?

Radhika Dutt: Thank you for asking this question. Because I think this is a topic that we need to talk so openly about both in the product community, in the tech sector, but even in the corporate world. 

As a person of color and especially as a woman of color, and I'll say, as someone who is part of a marginalized group, it is so much harder to be heard. And because of some of these ideas of toxic masculinity and that the vision comes from, typically it's a man who's at the top of this organization. It is that much harder for a woman and a woman of color to take ownership of that vision.

So one of the things that you will see about the whole Radical Product Thinking approach is rather than taking the approach of a vision where it's one person saying, this is the vision and people get to it, it is all structured so that this is a more collaborative approach. And it is a facilitative approach, meaning that it's structured so that you can get by and around it.

And in reality, this is what is needed anyway, so that you can, as I said earlier, really get people to internalize a vision and make it their own and translate it into their action. So the way I use the Radical Product Thinking vision statement is that, as I mentioned, it's a fill in the blank statement.

So I, first of all, fill it out for myself just to get my head around, how would I answer these questions? But then I use this as a group exercise with my team. And the reason for doing this is twofold. One is to get everyone to share their perspective. And there's so much collective intelligence that you gather as a result of getting all of these perspectives.

It really helps you define the vision better. So that's the first thing. But the second part of it is that when people share their different perspectives on this vision, they also feel heard. And it really helps you get that buy in terms of, getting everyone to internalize this vision. And now, as a result of talking through it, you've aired misalignments, aligned better as a team. And at the end of this whole exercise, you have a shared vision for what's the world that you want to bring about.

Hannah Clark: It's brilliant. I have to wonder, during all this, I think that it's wonderful to have such a clear vision for your team. But then there's always going to be those feature requests and those things you need to make good on. How do you balance the need to preserve your vision and also make good on what's good for the business?

Radhika Dutt: Yeah, excellent question because one of the main things that goes wrong with vision statements is that writing a vision statement is often seen as a one off exercise. That, great, we have written up this vision statement. We can now wash our hands off of it. Let's file it away for posterity and move on.

Instead, what you really want to see happen is you want to use this vision in everyday decisions. And, as you gain experience as a leader, the way you end up making decisions in reality is you're just intuitively balancing long term against the short term. And so for your team, it's best to make that really explicit.

How are you balancing the long term and the short term? If it's the X and Y, I like to make the X and Y explicit by drawing it as an X and a Y axis so it's visual for the team. And of course, this X and Y axis is this engineering approach, right? So let's think about the Y axis as vision fit.

You can ask yourself, is this feature good for the vision or not? And the X axis is survival. Does this vision help me survive another day or is that making it harder for survival? We've talked about how you define the vision. We also should talk about how do you define survival? Because if you're a startup, survival might mean financial survival.

Do you have money to make payroll? And maybe adding this feature is going to win you this big deal, which will give you money. On the other hand, if you're a large company, maybe financial survival is not what your X axis is. That survival for you as a product manager might mean stakeholder support.

Meaning that, if your stakeholders don't approve of the job that you're doing, don't approve of how your product is doing, they can kill your product. And so, there are other such survival concepts, like it could be maybe legal survival, but think of yourself like a gazelle. You're running from one predator at a time.

You can't run from all of them. So what is your biggest existential threat? And so once you've defined these two axes, now you can evaluate features on vision versus survival. So let's say a feature is good for both. Well, of course, that's an easy decision. That's ideal. But if you always focus on easy decisions, then you're not really thinking long term.

You're constantly thinking the short term. So sometimes you need to do things that are good for the vision, but maybe not helpful in the short term. And that's called investing in the vision. And if you don't invest in the vision, your product goes bad. So investing in the vision, an example might be, if you're refactoring code for three months, if you are investing in user research so that you get to really understand the problem. 

So those are examples of investing in the vision. The opposite of that is when you're taking on what I call vision debt. That's where you're doing things that are good for survival in the short term, but it's bad for your vision fit.

And an example of this would be, that custom feature we talked about. It's not to say that you'll never do it, but if you keep taking on vision debt, that's what leads to obsessive sales disorder. And so no quadrant is bad per se, it's just a matter of talking about it and communicating with your team to think about, how much can you afford to invest in the vision? If you're a bootstrapped startup, maybe you don't get to invest in the vision and right now, maybe you're having to take on some vision debt because of pressures that you're under.

But the question then is, when will you ever invest in the vision? By acknowledging something is vision debt, at least it gives your team the confidence you care about the vision, that this is not a top down loss of confidence in the vision, that you're acknowledging vision debt. This is why we're doing it. And eventually, we're going to do better and invest in the vision. 

Hannah Clark: What would you say is the point where eventually just needs to happen? When you've taken on so much vision debt, if you're stuck on survival mode for so long, I think it can be easy to be on autopilot in those situations where the easiest thing to do in the path of least resistance is just to continue to do whatever is just next on the roadmap.

Radhika Dutt: Yeah, and your point, it's just so spot on because that is exactly what happens. Sometimes, we have so much vision debt and like I said, this whole roadmap filled with things that you have to make good on that it's hard to feel like you're ever going to get out from under it.

And the analogy I like to draw, it's like technical debt. If you have such a mountain of technical debt, sometimes you feel like you just need to overhaul your platform altogether. So how do you avoid that? One example of a company that took this approach to acknowledging vision debt versus investing in the vision, what they did was they made a decision that, every sprint we're going to make a small investment investing in the vision. 

At least let's maybe invest 20% of time investing in the vision. That was the threshold that they came up with. The answer to how much you invest in the vision might be different based on where your company is at, but thinking about what small incremental investments in the vision can you make. And the other thought is, sometimes you have to bite the bullet and take on big things. It's like technical debt. But I'll say that vision debt is even worse than technical debt in that when you keep taking on vision debt, it's debt that you can't get out from because very often you cannot fire customers.

Technical debt, you might be able to say, okay, I'm just going to, throw out this whole feature and redo it. Sometimes, it's much harder to do with customers where you've done a custom feature where you cannot get out from under it. And so thinking more carefully about vision debt, and also every time you take on vision debt, trying to build this discipline of how am I going to invest in the vision?

Hannah Clark: I think that really points to the idea of being proactive about your vision debt. And I think that's what the company you mentioned getting at by allocating a budget in advance. Do you know of any other strategies that, especially if anyone's listening and is thinking, Oh my gosh, this is me.

What are some proactive strategies that we can use to avoid accumulating vision debt, or at least not get us into too much of it at one time?

Radhika Dutt: So one thing I'll say is the very use of this vision versus survival to communicate why you're pushing back on a feature. Very often when we're talking about priorities, whether it's with stakeholders or executives, or even with our team, prioritization decisions often get very contentious.

The other angle to prioritization is we often use a matrix where we have this list of features in our backlog. So it might be like 250 items in your backlog that are each ranked against, five different design principles, let's say, and then, we assign numbers to each of those. And then this magic spreadsheet gives you numbers saying, okay, this item is number 25 and this item is number 157.

But if you ask your team or even stakeholders, why are we doing this and why is it more important than this? Everyone will just say, well, it's because spreadsheet says 520 as the priority list item. But you know, it doesn't create this intuition in people that this is why we need to do it.

What is this balance between long term and short term? So the trick that I've used is use this vision versus survival to communicate priorities and your way of thinking. Get everyone using this vocabulary so that even your CEO starts to think in these terms. And once you draw it up as visual versus survival and people start to visualize this, it becomes a way of thinking for them.

And so start to introduce this. The other benefit it has by the way, is that this puts you again in this leadership position and it helps you take on this facilitative approach. And that's one of the tricks that I've learned in my career to be able to create more of this communication and discussion so that we're not just sounding terribly aggressive, but yet we make our point really clearly.

Hannah Clark: So I have a little bit of a tangent here. So have you found that this vision versus survival model has been helpful for you in terms of avoiding this being seen as aggressive as a person of color or as a woman of color in a product team?

Radhika Dutt: Yes, exactly. Like one of the challenges for people of color or women is that the same trait of leadership that is appreciated in men is very often not seen in the same way when a woman says the same thing. A woman being assertive about priorities might be seen as, Oh, you're just being too aggressive. You're not getting enough buy in. That's often the comment I got in my career, you're not seeking buy in and consensus.

And so it taught me this approach of vision versus survival as a workaround. And this is not to say that those systemic issues don't need to be addressed. But in the meanwhile, while the systemic issues exist, this is one of the ways that I found to be able to communicate and take a facilitative approach to be able to make my point and spread my thinking by getting people to use such vocabulary and understanding how I trade off long term versus short term and get people to really absorb my vision.

Hannah Clark: And I think it would be so beneficial for all of us to take on this way of presenting and defending and explaining the vision. Because if everybody is adopting this model, then it doesn't have to become a defense mechanism. It can be just par for the course, right? 

Radhika Dutt: Exactly, because that is, after all, what you want.

You really want, as a leader, to get people to think like you and to understand your rationale and be able to talk through that, right? One of the things that this also helps do is it makes just discussions less contentious, no matter who you are. Because what happens often in a discussion about priorities is that it becomes the spite about who is right and a subjective matter, as opposed to, very often when you draw the vision versus survival, one of the questions it leads to is, Wait, so is this good for the vision or not?

And are we aligned on the vision? Sometimes you have to go back to that question. In other cases, it might lead to a discussion of, are we defining survival the right way? Maybe our survival axis has changed a little bit or for example, if you and I are not aligned, maybe it's because our survival axes are slightly different.

As a salesperson, your survival axis might be a little different from my survival axis as a product person. So start the conversation by talking about what is vision and what is survival. And that really helps create a little bit more consensus and it avoids things being as contentious because it's more of an objective discussion.

Hannah Clark: And I suppose it also becomes a lot more common ground because you can see really where each other's motivations lie. 

Radhika Dutt: Exactly. 

Hannah Clark: Yeah, that's very interesting. And I want to tie this back to hero syndrome a little bit. Because I feel that when you're defending the vision itself also needs to be something that's well defined, but also you have to have a clear ethical sense of where that vision is or where it could head.

How do you prevent the vision from veering into that hero syndrome in which everyone is steering towards something that maybe isn't ethical or maybe isn't a problem that should be solved?

Radhika Dutt: You know, your question is just so timely in terms of ChatGPT, for example. If you question what is the vision exactly behind ChatGPT?

I don't think anyone has truly written down this vision in terms of what problem are we exactly solving for? We've created ChatGPT using large language models, but we haven't built it ground up to create outcomes that we specifically and deliberately are trying to create. It's more that we've said, Oh, here's a technical solution to a problem where this could answer any sort of a question.

But, you know, thinking about it in terms of a vision and thinking about a product as a mechanism to create change means we have to define, what is the change you want to see in the first place? That is one of the fundamental problems with how we build products today. We often see product, like whatever product we're building and the success thereof has the end goal in itself.

Instead, the way we need to think about a product is that the definition of a product is it's only a mechanism to create the change you want to see in the world. So start by defining what is that change. And then you can start to be more systematic about how will you engineer that change you bring about.

And in fact, if your product does not bring about the change that you specifically intended, then it is not a successful product. 

Hannah Clark: I think this is a very good point. And I think when we chat again, we'll delve a little bit more into the ethics, including some of the guardrails that maybe aren't there that should be around artificial intelligence and large language models.

But in the meantime, I think we'll wrap it up on that note. Radhika, thank you so much for joining us. Where can listeners follow you and hear more about your work?

Radhika Dutt: So first there's the Radical Product Thinking book. It's in bookstores and online bookstores around you. Aside from the Radical Product Thinking book, you can also get the free toolkit on radicalproduct.com. 

I also have a blog there where, I write stories only that really interests me. So hopefully you'll enjoy those blog posts. And then lastly, I always love to hear from people on LinkedIn and hear how they're creating change through Radical Product Thinking. So please feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn as well.

Hannah Clark: Well, this has been a very enlightening conversation. Thank you so much for your time. And I can't wait to have you back. 

Radhika Dutt: Thank you. I'm looking forward to our next conversation. This is so much fun. 

Hannah Clark: Thanks for listening in. For more great insights, how to guides and tool reviews, subscribe to our newsletter at theproductmanager.com/subscribe. You can hear more conversations like this by subscribing to The Product Manager wherever you get your podcasts.