Remote Product Vision Workshop
How to create a product vision if you can't get everyone into the same room
This is a pretty detailed outline of how to run a Remote Product Vision workshop when you can’t bring everyone together because of budget or travel constraints. To make sure that everyone has the same level of access every participant should dial in via their own computer. Avoid meeting room group call-ins at all costs!
Originally created in August 2020, this is a slightly annotated and expanded version of the workshop description.
As the VP/Director/Head of Product, you are in charge of the creation and continuous refinement of the product vision. If you don’t have a defined vision yet, or feel you need to formalize the vision in your head, now is a good time as any to get started.
Do not do this alone though. You’ll be much more successful if you can include input from your executive team and from key players across the organization from the very beginning. It’s time to do a Product Vision Workshop.
Pre-pandemic, this decision would have autotmatically resulted in booking a day or two and a meeting room into everyone’s calendars. Back in the day, I would have flown out to Tallinn, where the company I worked for had its headquarters. There would have been lots of post-its involved. In 2020 we did not have that luxury though, so I created this remote Product Vision Workshop.
The pandemic is over, and yet travel restrictions due to budget contraints or difficult visa procedures continue to exist. So I am sharing theprocess here in the hopes you can adapt it to your own reality and organization.
Preparation for a remote Product Vision Workshop
“Remote” in this context means that participants are do not share the same physical location. The workshop still requires synchronous availability for everyone involve, though you can (and should) divy the time into smaller chunks.
To allow for participants to be fully present and avoid the drag of a 6 hour working sessions without breaks, here are some guidelines:
Break it up into several sessions
Have you ever tried to get two full-day meetings onto the virtual calendar of your CEO? Yeah, not happening, not even with a lot of advance planning. Yo can however get several two-hour-slots on consecutive days or weeks into their agenda.
Spread out your workshop. Have people think between sessions! Those after-hour ideas now can make it back into the workshop instead of being discarded for being “too late”. Slots should not be longer than 2 hours. I secretly plan to be done at the 100 min mark so everyone has a bit of time to collect their thoughts before the next task on their calendar.
In the example workshop I am using here, we started off with a two-hour-slot on a Wednesday followed by two hours on a Friday the same week. Then we took a break for two weeks and followed up with another set of two 2-hour slots on a Wednesday. That means we had a total of six hours face-to-face. However, the real magic happened in between sessions, for two reasons:
The important questions stick and people mull over them (more or less) consciously.
Lukewarm ideas without anyone being excited about them disappear into the sunset almost by themselves, which makes it easier to let go.
The time in between sessions is also your opportunity to review what has happened, write up a summary and check if the next session needs any adjustments ahead of time. Remember: the vision is important enough to warrant the time investment. You don’t need to get it done in one single setting.
Assign homework before (and between) sessions
No one should “just show up” for a workshop (nor for any other meeting, honestly). In order to make most of the precious time, make sure to prime everyone for the sessions. This is the exact text that I sent to my executive team on the Friday before our first workshop session. In our case I sent it via Slack, but email probably also works.
Next week we are going to have a vision workshop to a) define the direction we want to go in and b) make sure we are clear on our foundation and what sets us apart already.
I’ve prepared some exercises and ideas to guide the discussion so we have a tangible outcome in the end. The exact input will come from all of us.
So, over the weekend (or before the workshop), please make a list for yourself about the opportunities you see for our product. I know it may sound obvious, and there will be an overlap in those lists – but by writing down some ideas, your brain will be prepared to dive into the workshop and feed off each others’ ideas much better.
Create a guideline for yourself, especially if you are supposed to both facilitate and participate
They say that you can’t both facilitate and participate in a workshop. And yes, it can be a complicated situation. That does not mean it’s impossible. It just requires more preparation.
Personal side note: I’ve also been told that you can’t have a proper career with kids, you can’t lead and scale a product team remotely, and that a 4 day work week is incompatible with leadership. So I am naturally suspicious when someone tells me I can or cannot do something. Rarely in life are we doing anything under optimal conditions anyway. In order to separate the real deal from hearsay, I recommend digging into the assumptions behind why something is deemed impossible – and take it from there.
In on-site workshops, the facilitator is a separate role for good reason. They need to keep the conversation going, wrap up sections, summarize ideas and lead into the next exercise. By breaking up your remote workshop into different sections, you can effectively do the “facilitator” parts in between sessions. Hence, it’s much easier to step in and out of the facilitator role.
For this reason, my personal preparation notes for this particular workshop was about three pages long, and very detailed. I included the links to different tools that I would use, the intro for each exercise, and my own ideas (more on that below). The more structure you can create for yourself beforehand, the easier you can flow with the conversations during the workshop.
The outline of our remote Product Vision Workshop
We had two objectives for this workshop:
Defining a vision/North Star that helps guide decisions we need to do today in order to be successful tomorrow.
Clarify our core beliefs and the truths we operate upon to maintain a stable foundations for all decisions.
The vision allows us to make decisions and chart a way forward. The underlying core beliefs give us the stability we need to act today.
This means that our workshop was divided into three parts – with each session dedicated to one part.
Finding our foundation and comparing our current conceptions
Honing in on the opportunities we all see
Defining the vision and translating it in memorable catch phrases
You can create the communication and visualization part even after the third session, experimenting with different visualizing options. At the end of the day it’s your responsibility to conceptualize and communicate the final vision, knowing that your executive team is on board. That’s why they need to be part of the creation process. It’s the only way to get everyone on the same page.
Session 1. Finding your Foundation
Before looking into the future, you need to make sure that everyone is aligned around where you are now and what the values are you want to absolutely keep for the future. If you search for workshops on this topic, you’ll find the classic post-it brainstorming exercise followed by organizing those post-its on a wall and handing out stickers to everyone to “vote” on topics.
With no wall and no post-its, I went back to my objectives.
I wanted to get an unbiased idea of what people saw as our superpowers without being influenced by what others were writing.
With everyone involved, I wanted to get to a clear hierarchy among the proposed values.
I settled on two tools to make this happen:
The sli.do word cloud generator for the initial brainstorming.
The priority decision chart (see below) to rate the characteristics against each other.
Pro tip: Of course by facilitating the slido presentation, I would be seeing everyone’s answers. So to make sure I also entered the exercise unbiased, I wrote down my ideas ahead of time to then simply copy-paste them during the exercise.
The magic of mixing word cloud creativity and structured prioritization
The leading question in my (previously prepared) sli.do presentation was:
> What makes us unique that we do not want to lose?
I wrote down my own thoughts on the question in advance, so I would not get side-tracked by seeing what others were writing. So these were my personal answers: ease-of-use, flexibility, codevelopment with important players, plug-and-play setup, laser focus on CX, useful for SMEs and BPOs.
This is a partial view of our results, and if there was any doubt – easy-of-use continues to be what we hold precious.
We then grouped the topics together to account for slight differences in describing the same concept, and to be able to compare these concepts among themselves. At this point, we are moving from collecting ideas towards prioritizing them.
Next, we used this prioritization chart to compare the different areas against each other. As a reminder: if A is more important than B, this does not mean that B is not important. It just means it’s slightly less important than A. You might have to repeat this on several occasions while you are rating your foundation concepts.
Some comparisons were really easy and did not require any discussion. Others already sparked really interesting conversations. These discussions around where each participant places their focus are a feature, not a bug.
The initial assessment is often influenced by each person’s background. Your technology leader will likely skew towards things that allow you to leverage technology, while your sales or marketing leader might be more invested in how attractive something looks for the market. Both perspectives are equally valuable, and by sharing the reason behind our differences we managed to get a very clear picture of what matters to us as a group.
Already at this point we realized that at this company we were passionate about the entire experience. We want to make a real difference, based on data, not anecdotes.
Before wrapping up this session, I asked everyone to take 5 min and write down a vision statement that THEY felt encapsulated our long term direction in our Slack channel. This allowed me to get a feeling for how far or how close we were in our visions before looking more in-depths into future opportunities.
Again, the individual vision statements will be somewhat influenced by the role of each person in the company. After all, it’s normal to focus on one’s own specialty area. Your challenge as the facilitator (and my challenge as being both a participant and a facilitator) is creating a joint statement that everyone can embrace, without becoming too airy or abstract.
Personal side note: If the answers you you get are too abstract, or too broad (e.g. “innovation”, you may want to do another wordcloud exercise with the following question: What are our competitors doing really well that we do NOT want to engage with). Defining what you are not going to do is just as powerful as defining your North Star since it gives you a secondary guard rail.
Session 2. Visions and opportunities
In the previous session, I had asked everyone to write down their version of a possible vision. Unsurprisingly, these phrases were tinted through our individual lenses. The CTO was all about technical possibilities, the founders were invested in the sales pitch. Both are important perspectives, so the challenge of this next session is getting from the very abstract to specific opportunities. At this point in your own workshop, you’ll see more opportunities than you can possibly embrace, both from a resource as well as attention point of view.
This means you need to be able to define these opportunities to then ruthlessly decide where to focus on. The biggest challenge is to keep the conversations vision-focussed. It’s all too easy to slide into solution-focus-mode and get stuck at the detail level. If this happens, it’s your taks as the facilitator is to bring everyone back to the vision level when it’s getting too nitty-gritty.
As a reminder (quoting the GLE model coined by the former VP Product at Netflix), the strategy should allow us to:
Get big where you are (strong foundation)
Lead into future areas (spearhead development)
Expand (get into adjacent markets)
Because of ease-of-use, we decided to use sli.do again to tap into our different perspectives and create the biggest list possible of opportunities. At this point it was very handy that we had people from different areas in this workshop, including myself who used to be a customer of the very product.
Personal side note: You could even invite a trusted customer into this session to get their perspective – while not forgetting that they won’t represent ALL customers.
Unsurprisingly the list that we created was quite extensive. We consolidated ideas that had been mentioned by several people and then grouped similar ideas together. This time, however, we did not go into prioritization mode right away. Instead, we moved the entire list to a Trello board to investigate every opportunity as a standalone idea.
The board setup allows us to move ideas around, add details and labels, links and insights. So we kind of ended up with sticky notes, but without having to take a photo after the workshop.
Also, who used to look at those photos anyway.
What’s next? What is the final result?
At some point during this session the discussion morphed from vision to strategy and solutions. In an on-site setting with a facilitator, that person would have reconducted the conversation to the high level. However, I made a conscious decision to let the third session derail, continuing with the opportunity discussion in our fourth session.
The input that I got this far allows me to take a step back on my own time and craft the vision that I can present (and defend if necessary). I am using the following statement as the guideline here:
The reason [company] exists is our passion for high quality customer support and our conviction that by analyzing the right conversations in any organization you can make more impactful decisions around training, resource allocation and CX strategy.
Note that this is neither a succinct mission statement nor a detailed vision of the future. It’s the spring board though to understand what the product intends to achieve for those who are using it.
By engaging in more specific discussions that border into strategy territory, I get immense value out of those concentrated hours with the top people in one (virtual) room.
Wrap-up: Turn “remote” into an opportunity
Working remotely is not better or worse than working in an office. Collaborating with people remotely is not easier or more difficult than doing an on-site workshop. Doing stuff in person just seems more accessible, because most of us have done it all our lives. So here’s your reminder, just because it has been done like that forever, does not mean it’s the only way to do it.
As you are taking your activities into a remote setting, take this as an opportunity to think about why you are doing the things you do. What is the purpose, what are you trying to accomplish? These are powerful questions in product development, in habit formation, and about anywhere you want to get a new perspective.
Doing something different is hard. Hard does not mean impossible, nor does it mean it’s not worth it.
One more resource moved to Substack from my previous way too detailed personal website. Thanks for reading!