Tips & Tricks to Build Team Vision & Strategy

1. How to: Team Vision
& Strategy
Tips & Tricks to Build Team Vision & Strategy
Rushil Dave

2. Why it’s needed?
Team Vision and Strategy doc is an important tool to:
● Motivate and inspire the team
● Align teams and stakeholders on problem space/s
● Guide the team with fundamentals and vision
● Enable the team to achieve the goals and measure them with KPIs
● Keep up with the discussions on conflicting priorities
Without a vision and strategy, it’s easy to jump from one idea or opportunity directly into
solution mode without seeing the bigger picture and that may end up in scattered attempts
to build products without clear path and benefits.

3. Strategy
Mid to long term
6 to 12 months
Milestones
Short to mid term
2 to 6 months
Vision
Long term
12 to 18 months
The Structure
Background &
Purpose
Problem Space &
Scope
Guiding
Principles
Imaginary Press
Release
Vision & Mission
Goals & KPIs
(OKRs)
Roadmap
(Milestones)
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4. Team Vision & Strategy
Set a long-term vision. It is the description of what the
product will be in the future and reminds why we are
doing something.
Involve the team. The vision should be the constant the
team builds upon, and believes in.
Spend time with your customers. To understand who
they are, what they value, and how you can help them
Ensure you’ve got alignment and buy-in. Communicate
your vision & strategy and get their regular feedback.
The vision & strategy is not a static document. It’s a
living doc and needs to be kept alive.

5. Align with your
team and
gather
feedback
Understand Consumer &
Situation
The Process
Know your
customers
and target
audience
Get to know
the history &
background
Identify the
problems to
solve and
cluster them
Find a high
level way
forward to
solve those
problems
Derive
vision,
mission,
problem
spaces and
their scope
Convert the
vision into
short and
mid term
goals and
KPIs
Ask your team,
domain teams
& stakeholders
for feedback
Continuous
improvement,
feedback and
adjustments
Problem Space vs
Solution Space Vision, Strategy & Goals
1
2
3
4
5
6
7

6. Imaginary Press Release
Imaginary Press Release should be able to give you,
your team and audience an extreme clarity on:
● what you’re doing,
● why are you doing it and
● most importantly why and how that will help
your customers.
Tip! Start with rough press release in the beginning jotting down
different points, work on vision and strategy and then at the end
make the press release concrete reflecting the problems to solve
and their impact on the customer.

7. Structure for Imaginary Press Release
Heading & Summary
Company and Team Introduction
Problem/s to solve
Solution/s to those problem/s
Quote from someone
How to get started
Customer Impact
Closing and Call to Action

8. Vision & Mission
The Vision statement should be:
● A long term objective
● Representing team’s core essence
● Purposeful and impactful
● Customer centric
The Mission statement should be:
● The approach to achieve the vision
● Clear, concise and continuous
● Collective and action driven
Tip! Sometimes it’s okay to combine both of them if the
statement can fulfill both vision and mission objectives.

9. Examples of Vision & Mission
An Example Vision Statement of a Klarna team:
“Provide a consistent consumer concept and interfaces
for consumer data management to Klarna teams to
help them build world-class consumer facing
products.”
An Example Mission Statement of a Klarna team:
“We drive consumer facing consumer concept at
Klarna, manage core consumer details, and support
Klarna teams to maintain consumer data in a secure,
purposeful and cost-efficient manner.”

10. Background & Purpose
Background and Purpose helps to set
the tone for team’s problem space and
strategy
It explains the reasoning behind
team’s existence and impact it has on
company's vision and strategy
It makes the audience understand the
history and “where are we coming
from” part
It also helps audience understand what
challenges the team is facing and why
Individual Team Organization
Team Purpose

11. Structure for Background & Purpose
This section should answer following questions:
● Why your team exists? Why it was established at
first?
● How does the team create impact and fit into the
organization?
● What would happen if the team doesn’t exists?
● What have you tried until now? Successes, failures?
● Any legacy problems or systems your team
inherited? Explain.

12. Problem Spaces & Scope
One the most important sections of team strategy
which clearly states what consumer problems your
team is or will be solving and how
It provides clear focus and way forward in the
difficult situations with conflicting priorities and
concepts
Scoping of problem space is very important not to
have overlaps with other teams or problem spaces
It also helps to identify the challenges to overcome
to deliver on team’s vision and strategy
?

13. Structure for Problem Space & Scope
Overview
● What your team does on a high level
● What customer and business problems does it
solve
Problem Space # 1
● Introduction & definition
● What exact problems will be solved within this
space?
● Solution specific points but only on a high-level
● What is In Scope?
● What is Out of Scope?
Problem Space # 2
● --- think and repeat ---

14. Guiding Principles
They are team’s Core Values.
These principles should such that they will be able
to guide the team in conflicting situations and
difficult discussions
They also help the team to align on team’s strategy
going forward with other teams who might be
working very closely to the problem space
Explain these principles well with reasonings and
any side effect or implications

15. Example from Whole Foods:
An Example of Guiding Principles
We Care About Our Communities
and the Environment
We serve and support a local experience for
our consumers as well as suppliers in the most
sustainable way possible.
● Rationale: The unique character of
each store is a direct reflection of a
community’s people, culture, and
cuisine.
● Implication: We need to build our local
supply chain network and partnerships
for sustainable food products in order
to expand to new areas.
Satisfy &
Delight
Customers
Promote
Teams
Win-win
Partnerships
Support
Communities
“Whole Foods”

16. KPIs
KPIs are the reflection of mid-term goals tied to
the solution space of your team
Build SMART KPIs with explanation, definition,
and target.
Get quality data to measure the KPIs correctly
Specific
Measurable
Actionable
Relevant
Time-framed
An Example from Zalando App:
Increase in App “Stickiness”
We drive more user engagement and attract “sticky” users to
visit our app more frequently.
● Definition: Ratio of Daily Active Users (DAU) to Monthly
Active Users (MAU). The higher the ratio, the more often
users return to the app.
● Baseline: xx% (01/2016) | Target: yy% (by 06/2016)

17. Roadmaps
Roadmap should reflect short and mid
term milestones on a time scale to move
towards goals and the vision
Keep the roadmaps concrete for 1 to 2
months but open afterwards due to high
degree of uncertainty
Kanban style roadmaps are very helpful for
pipeline based projects
Use MoSCoW method for time-boxed
projects for prioritization and roadmaps
Time Frame
Topic Area #1
Topic Area #2
Milestone #1 Milestone #2
Milestone #3
Roadmap

18. Examples & Resources
Product Vision & Strategy
Product Vision, Strategy & Roadmap
Examples of Company Values
On Goals and KPIs
Set Goals with OKRs
How to Develop KPIs
Vision with the team
re:Work Tool from Google
Shared Team Vision
On Press Release
Amazon Press Releases