Creating a product vision

Before Christmas I kicked off a piece of work to define the product vision and strategy for Thriva’s Diagnostics-as-a-Service (DaaS) platform.

As I started this exercise I found there's not much actually written on how to create a compelling product vision (sorry, Roman) 🤦🏻‍♀️It's like some people just "know" how to paint great visions, and others (like me) are stronger at executing on that vision (I've previously thought visioning was a bit fluffy ☁️ )

I found it a bit of a challenge, and I had to *quickly* overcome this self-limiting belief.

So I thought if there's others like me in this situation it may be helpful to share how I approached it:

(1) Talking to others in the business 💬 - Exec, Sales, Op, Product: what ideas were already circulating and being discussed, what were we learning from the market and customers on what was needed?

(2) Desktop research on what we were trying to build 💻 - using articles for inspiration on what is DaaS, its key components, who's currently offering what in the market

(3) Thinking about changing and emerging trends in healthcare 📈 - e.g. personalised medicine, prevention v treatment, patient agency over health, convenience factor - how did all these apply to our situation?

(4) Mindmapping 🕷 - starting to capture these ideas and look at the connections and commonality, see what emerged.

(5) Simplification 🧱 - taking it right back to first principles, not over complicating it. For instance, some of the literature talked about 8-10 different components of DaaS - I boiled these down to 4, that became the building blocks of the product strategy.

Once I got to a first draft of what the future in 3 years could look like, I was able to look at the current state, and identify the delta between these - which then informed the product roadmap. The approach still leaves plenty of room for learning and exploration along the way, and also leaves clues for how to measure product success that I can consolidate into the product KPIs. Moving on from this, the product vision can be used to structure the roadmap and as a starting point for other conversations, e.g. the value prop, pricing strategy, positioning, etc.