Course: The Business of Product Management 2. Module: Invent and Simplify. Lesson: Draft your product vision. Topic: Elements of your product vision. Welcome back! From the last course you have: One, validated your customer persona insights by selling your MVP. Two, sized your potential market to discuss with potential investors, and three, formulated a strategy based after examining competitive threats. Now, you bring all this information together to create a product vision. In this lesson, you will learn: what is the point of a product vision. Two, how to draft your product vision. Three, how to differentiate between good and bad product visions. If you rank all of your plans from longest term on top to shortest term on the bottom, your product vision should be the most long-term. When your company has more than one product, each product should have its own vision, and each product vision should be more specific than the company's overall vision. The purpose of the product vision is that it guides your team's overall efforts. Otherwise, it's easy to be too reactive and respond to emergencies. Rather than being proactive and prioritize building a coherent product. For our see one, do one, teach one, I'll take you through and rate real product visions. Some are excellent, some have room for improvement. Let's take a look. According to Geoffrey Moore, the product vision follows this format. First off, For, let's try to define the target customer. Who, representing the statement of need or opportunity. Three, the product name is a product category that the key benefit compelling reason to buy, unlike primary competitive alternative. Lastly, our product, the statement of primary differentiation. Real companies don't always follow Geoffrey Moore's format. Let's rate some of their product visions. Let's start with Tesla. This product vision is what exactly Tesla did: build sports car, use that money to build an affordable car, use that money to build an even more affordable car, and while doing all the above, provide zero-emission electric power generation options. Lastly, don't tell anyone. This was an excerpt from the August 2006 blog titled, "The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan Part 1." I rate this product vision, 10 out of 10, it's exactly what Tesla did. Now, let's move on to Uber's mutating product vision. Uber started as a company for cabs called Uber Cab in 2009. Then San Francisco ordered it to drop "cab" from its name. Back then, this was its product vision: Build an effortless pickup experience for everyone, everywhere, every time. It's very clear, I'm sure all of us at this point have used Uber at one point in our lives. It's for everybody who has a smartphone, and it is pretty much available in any city that has Uber drivers or it's on the Uber app and at every time. I personally have taken Ubers to the airport at 3:00 AM in the morning and they're there. In terms of product vision, Uber does exactly what it says it is. It's effortless for everybody, everywhere, every time. For that, I rate it also like Tesla, a 10 out of 10. In 2014, Uber raised around of capital at a $17 billion valuation. Some New York University finance professor wrote an article calling this overvalued. Uber investor and board member, Bill Gurley, shot back: the professor missed Uber's TAM by a mile. Uber wasn't a cab company he said, it was the company that would replace car ownership. It was a transportation company. Uber's product vision expanded to include an entire industry. Make transportation as reliable as running water everywhere for everyone. Now, as you can clearly see, this product vision compared to the one above, expands upon just pickups and being effortless into really transportation. That's the word that I want everyone to hone in on, because it clearly expands its original vision. If you think about what Uber represents to us today. It has expanded to additional product lines like Uber Eats, Uber Black, Uber Pool, so on, so forth. Truly, for many of us who live in a densely populated area, such as cities, where Uber drivers are plentiful, car ownership is expensive. Many people have opted to no longer own cars, but to use Uber as their primary mode of transportation, and for that purpose, I also rate this at 10 out of 10. Next, after Uber is a $120 billion IPO cratered at half that value, it left employees very sad. Let's take a look at their latest product vision, the operating system for your everyday life. Now, with this I do have to say, it is more vague than what they had done before. Just looking at, for example, their seamless pickup, which was the first example we had walked through to the second example around transportation. Operating system? I'm going to say that it's very vague and it really seems to overreach what they actually are, which is still at its core, a transportation app, whether it's for people or food. For that reason, I'm going to rate this a 2 out of 10. Furthermore, this vision statement is a bit awkward. If you ask me what the operating system of my life was, I think that you're a little bit crazy, and it doesn't give much direction for any products at Uber. That's why I gave this product vision a 2 out of 10. A product vision that's too broad, doesn't help teams orient towards a goal. This is not an exercise where "boil the ocean" is the right approach. Let's look at the product vision of another famous startup. Can you guess which company this belongs to? Here it says our mission, to create a world where people work to make a life, not just a living. Well, if you guessed WeWork, then you're right. This is the vision of WeWork and the We brand companies. WeLive, WeSleep, VI SOVER hotel. WeBank, WeSail Caribbean Charter Yacht. All of that was valued at $47 billion by investors as recent as 2019. This is a great example of a product vision that didn't help WeWork focus on a coherent product. In fact, before I looked it up, I didn't even know which company had this mission statement. Now, describe your product and craft a vision for it in the discussion, Geoffrey Moore's product vision template will be available for your reference, but feel free to deviate from it because doing so better reflects your own personal and creative vision.
