Case Study: How to Develop Your Product Vision Collaboratively (Part 2)

​Dear Reader,​

​You can find part 1 of this series from last week here.​

Where to Collaborate Broadly

Inspiring everyone does not mean your vision needs to be decided by committee, and everyone needs to be pleased.

For Victoria, walking this line meant inviting contributions from the full team during an in-person team retreat, but creating a smaller core group that would prepare and drive the workshop, as well as take on the responsibility of synthesizing.

The workshop included 18 people, split into four groups, with a total of half a day of working time, including sharing and discussion. For a potentially less tangible topic like Product Vision, it’s helpful to let teams work through a structured output format to channel free-flowing discussions.

Utilizing the Future-State Empathy Map

Adapting a proven user research tool, such as the Empathy Map, to be forward-facing – i.e., imagining future user states rather than documenting current ones gave Victoria’s team a structured way into vision work, which can otherwise feel less productive than shipping features or fixing bugs.

The goal was to use the four quadrants for describing where your user will be, not where they are:

• Which pains will be gone
• Which gains get unlocked
• What they will observe
• What they can now do effortlessly

While tools can be extremely useful, how you approach them with your team dictates their success.

For the logistics of working with an Empathy Map, you will need to rely on your Product Manager. It’s their job to make it time-boxed, grounded in real user insights, and oriented toward tangible outcomes, taking it beyond being a beautiful phrase. This can go a long way in addressing the skepticism that is natural on any newly formed team.

As Victoria puts it, the workshop shapes direction through the quality of brainstorming, the themes that emerge, and the energy in the room. It just does not produce the final statement yet, it's where the thinking happens.

Where to Drive Decisions in a Smaller Circle

After the workshop, the full team's input is synthesized by the smaller core group — typically the PM and one or two peers. Their job is to aggregate the empathy maps, group ideas into clusters, and extract the value themes that surface most strongly.

Victoria's themes from this synthesis were concrete and distinct:

1. Complete data trust
2. Zero-touch automation
3. User empowerment

Each one pointed to a different dimension of the change they wanted to create for procurement managers. Invest in creating this specificity from the broader group work. Because vague themes will produce vague vision statements, which, in turn, will not carry power.

Investing in Creating a Vision Story Before a Statement

Before drafting a single vision statement, Victoria wrote a one-page story. It follows a fictional procurement manager arriving at work with a goal, and shows how they achieve it now compared to how they used to.

The before-and-after is the point. A brief story can capture and communicate that transformation much more easily than a concise statement or the Future-State Empathy map. It forces you to articulate three things in one move:

• who the user is,
• what their reality was, and
• what is genuinely different now because of what your product does.

This is worth the investment before writing any statement. A story you can't tell compellingly is a sign the vision isn't sharp enough yet. A story that lands gives you the raw material to distill from.

Blockquote: "I am deeply convinced that any good story is a story of a change, and a vision story is no exception. A good vision reflects a change that you want to bring into your users' lives. And it doesn't have to be big and dramatic."

Scenario Testing Your Vision

From the story that followed the workshop collaboration, Victoria drafted four short statement options — each emphasizing a different value theme. One focused on trust in the data, one on effortless scalability, one on enabling data-driven decisions. Then she brought them back to the team alongside two or three real decisions the team could face. The goal was to test which of these would be the most helpful for the team.

Each breakout group took one scenario and ran it through each vision statement as a decision lens: which statement actually helps you make what decision? A clear frontrunner emerged from the groups' feedback. The wording was refined based on the team's reactions in the discussion and the friction of a real decision; one statement felt more inspiring than the others.

Don't skip the story and go straight to drafting vision statements. Without it, you lose clarity on who your user is and what change you're actually creating for them — and without that, you have no real basis for deciding which opportunities are worth pursuing.

After working through the workshop, the synthesis, the vision story, and the scenario testing, Victoria's team arrived at something most platform teams never stop to create: a shared statement they had genuinely stress-tested together, and that had already proven it could guide a real decision.

That's what makes the remaining work possible. Circulating a vision people helped shape is a different conversation than asking colleagues to align behind something handed down to them. And reaching for it in daily decisions is easier when the team has already seen it work.

Thank you for Practicing Product,

​Tim​

If you consume one thing this week, make it this...

Who is Tim Herbig?

As a Product Management Coach, I guide Product Teams to measure the real progress of their evidence-informed decisions.

I focus on better practices to connect the dots of Product Strategy, Product OKRs, and Product Discovery.