Customer Centric Innovations

01 · Product Management

Product Vision Sprint

A working-backwards workshop that gets your team to agree, in a sentence, on who the customer is and what winning looks like, and to write it down themselves.

When a team can't say, in a sentence, who the customer is and what winning looks like, every meeting relitigates the same questions and the roadmap drifts.

Signs your team needs this

How it works

This is a working engagement, not a deliverable handed over from the outside. We guide your team as they do the work, so what gets built is something they understand, own, and can keep running after we leave.

  1. Start from what you know

    We begin by reviewing what the team already has: research, data, sales and support feedback, and the places where people quietly disagree. Those disagreements are where the sprint does its most useful work.

  2. Work backwards from the customer

    In facilitated sessions, the team writes the story of the finished product from the customer's side: who they are, the problem worth solving, and what is better for them when it's solved. It's the working-backwards discipline Jason practiced at Amazon, adapted to your team and market.

  3. Pressure-test the assumptions

    We push on what sits underneath the story. What has to be true? What evidence do we have, and what are we guessing? The team sharpens the vision until it holds up to the hard questions.

  4. Make it usable

    The team distills the work into a one-page vision and a short set of guiding principles, written plainly enough that the rest of the organization can rally behind it and use it to make decisions.

What your team walks away with

A product vision they wrote

One page that says who the customer is, what problem you solve, and what winning looks like, authored by the team rather than handed to them.

A working-backwards narrative

The customer, the problem, and the outcome, told from the customer's point of view, so new people can understand the 'why' in minutes.

Guiding principles

A short list of tie-breakers that make future trade-offs faster and less political.

Why we work this way

A vision handed to a team gets followed. A vision a team writes gets defended.

That's why we facilitate rather than author. Our job is to ask the questions, hold the room to the customer, and keep the conversation honest. Your team does the writing, so when the sprint ends the vision belongs to the people who have to live with it.

Best fit

Teams launching something new, aligning around a fresh strategy, or stuck relitigating direction because the vision lives in one person's head.

Probably not the right fit

You need a strategy deck delivered without your team's involvement, or the direction is already decided and what you're really after is buy-in for it.

Common questions

Who should be in the room?

The people who will build, sell, and support the product: product, design and engineering leads, someone who hears from customers directly (sales, support, or customer success), and the executive who will sponsor the vision.

Do we need customer research before we start?

No. We start from what you have. Part of the sprint is naming what the team doesn't know yet, and those gaps often become the first things to test in a From Vision to Prototype engagement.

Is it remote or in person?

Either. The sprint works well fully remote, on site, or as a mix.

What usually comes next?

Teams typically move to putting the vision in front of customers with From Vision to Prototype, or to turning it into a sequenced plan with Backlog to Roadmap.

Related reading
Working Backwards: Five Questions to Answer Before You Build →

Working on a hard product problem?

Every engagement starts with a conversation about your customers, your team, and what you're trying to achieve. If Product Vision Sprint isn't the right shape, we'll say so and help you find what is.

Start a conversation

The thinking behind this work is in Jason's book, Nobody Confides in a Clipboard.

Other ways to work together