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Product Visioning and Strategy: Preparing for Agile Execution

Offered By: University System of Maryland via edX

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Product Management Courses Agile Courses Operations Management Courses Goal Setting Courses Strategic Planning Courses Performance Measurement Courses Corporate Culture Courses

Course Description

Overview

Setting a clear vision is essential for leaders in any organization, as it helps to guide decision-making and inspires employees and stakeholders to work towards common goals. Strategic planning leaders struggle with envisioning the future and may not have the skills to effectively communicate their vision. Senior leadership must then create action plans that elevate the strategic planning document so that all stakeholders are aligned. Strategy development matters only as much as it can be successfully executed. If you are considering a strategic planning process, you must be conscious of the interface between vision and execution.

The business environment is changing quickly as new technologies, risks and opportunities present themselves. Companies without strategic foresight and long-term vision capabilities will remain in reactive modes. Strategy formulation is not enough to withstand shocks. Strategists must commit time for reflective thinking and away from the day to day in order to scan the external environment and discover what the convergence of trends, demographics threats, and opportunities means for successful strategic planning.

Research shows that less than 10% of leaders consider themselves to be visionary and few think long-term about all stakeholders and their needs. This is a problem, as employees, product management teams, project managers and other stakeholders want to be part of a company with bold, clear strategic goals and strategic objectives that are ignited by a clearly described future state. The “why movement” linked to crafting purpose and organization’s mission statements is now being supplanted by the emerging “where movement.” This movement goes beyond brainstorming towards declaring the “big ideas” tied to long term goals that will inspire stakeholders and create a competitive advantage. “Where are we going?” as an organization is the primal question posed by employees that CEOs and product managers must smartly address. This program will show you how.

Furthermore, the rise of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) investors and stakeholders has increased the pressure on companies to take a longer-term view and link their vision to sustainable measures that delight a broad set of stakeholders.

As leaders pivot from the vision towards strategy execution, they are then met with either resistance or lift as organizational architecture and economics bring realism against the aspiration. Operational plans must confront and align their 4 pillars that will enable leaders to execute the organizations goals or wind up frustrated by the inertia that they create. The 4-pillar methodology delivers a strategic framework that makes the linkage between:

  1. Performance measurement and goal setting (OKRs or KPIs)
  2. Establishing team structures, organization charts and empowerment
  3. Rewards, punishments and incentives, and
  4. Corporate culture (norms, values, behaviors and assumptions).

    5. One example of a leader who successfully applied this strategic framework is CEO Satya Nadella of Microsoft. By focusing on these four pillars, he was able to transform the organization’s mission and pursue new opportunities that led Microsoft to become one of the most valuable companies in the world. Too often leaders simply change an element of culture or a piece of performance evaluation and there is a breakdown as they must look at all four pillars simultaneously. Nadella reset Microsoft’s business model and strategy as he optimized the four pillars against a strategy map that helped all employees know what mattered the most. Once in place, Microsoft began to unleash an effective product strategy chasing new time frames that routinely encourages product plans that are bold with outstanding user experiences.

    The program will also dissect cases like Wells Fargo where the business strategy and 4 pillars were misaligned and drove young employees to promote opening accounts with disastrous results for consumers and shareholders.

    This two-part course will make the connection between a long-term vision and strategic planning driven by the CEO and C-suite and the translation down to product design teams and project managers who live in day-to-day execution. By reinforcing mechanisms that drive constructive behaviors, the course will help leaders turn their big ideas into practical, tangible products. In doing so, it will make the power of vision more accessible and help leaders to create value for all stakeholders. By focusing on long-term vision (and exploring cathedral and multi-generational thinking) and clearly communicating it through concrete language, imagery, initiatives and storytelling, CEOs and founders as well as the product managers can set their organization apart and unite their people towards a common, achievable future. This course will teach how your business plan and business goals can be elevated by vision (big ideas) and executed through the proper alignment and reinforcement mechanisms within the 4 pillars.


Syllabus

Courses under this program:
Course 1: Generating Vision: Long-Term Big Ideas That Motivate Employees and Stakeholders

The “why movement” linked to crafting purpose and mission statements is now being supplanted by the emerging “where movement.” This movement goes beyond brainstorming towards declaring the “big ideas” that will inspire stakeholders. “Where are we going?” as an organization is the primal question posed by employees that CEOs and product managers must smartly address. This course will teach you how.



Course 2: The Productization of a Vision: Linking Operations to Strategy

Having a clear long-term vision is crucial for any organization to guide decision-making, but translating that vision into business goals, metrics, and product roadmaps requires a well-thought-out strategy that balances and aligns four key pillars: performance measurement and goal setting, team structures and empowerment, rewards and incentives, and corporate culture. This course will take Chief Product Officers and their direct reports into how they can close the gap between long term vision and big ideas and unleashing product design that delights customers and stakeholders.




Courses

  • 7 reviews

    4 weeks, 2-3 hours a week, 2-3 hours a week

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    CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs must routinely craft business plans that clearly describe the company’s future and address trends they see converging. Product managers must ensure that product road-maps don’t get bogged down in iterations so that leap frog innovations take root. Every company’s future must integrate artificial intelligence, manage uncertainty and down-select from infinite choices. Publishing a pithy vision statement often fails to help employees realize their team’s full potential and anticipate future customer needs. This course will help you clearly define a vision of “where” your company is going that will outperform even an inspiring one.

    Research demonstrates that companies with a long-term perspective tend to outperform those focused on short-term targets and quarterly goals. By taking a deep look into the future, leaders and employees can identify and mitigate potential blind spots and see patterns that can inhibit or drive growth.

    The course will critique multiple company vision statement examples and why they often fail to be motivating. Brainstorming and future thinking must be focused and met with techniques and asking the right questions that when implemented can have a huge impact on the bottom line.

    This course will help you to inspire your employees, team-members and all stakeholders through long-term thinking, visioning mindsets, strategic foresight, scenario planning and big idea generation. We will show you how to think long-term and what the many business benefits are. Too little time is allocated to dream big about the company’s future as long-term goals are quickly replaced by short term choices that holds back the full potential of the company. Leaders that don’t take the time to get the big ideas right and communicated will be rapidly replaced. This course will outline the clear differences between mission statements and strategic visioning so that management attention is routinely given towards thinking five to ten plus years into the future.

    The danger is in “Short-termism” as too many managers get stuck in day to day thinking as incentives are aligned to think quarterly, small and avoid projects that will take time to deliver bottom-line impact. Visioning has become an essential element of business strategy. Long-term perspective drives success. Yet vision statements often leave employees confused and and even disengaged; retention and relevancy is on the line.

    The most clever vision statements often fail to motivate employees if they can’t make sense out of the words and then see themselves within the images, concrete language story telling about the future. Vision statements are often a “check the box” crutch that leaders lean on when they are unable to imagine and get the big ideas right. This course will show that vision statements were never enough to inspire employees to join nor stay with your company. This course will bring you new frameworks, tools and templates that push leaders and mangers towards long-term thinking and planning that drives significant economic opportunity for all stakeholders.

    Less than 10% of leader’s self-identify as visionary, according to the Barrett Culture Values Center.

    Leaders at all levels struggle with vision and visioning for products, teams, and entire companies. Short-term incentives and behaviors inhibit exploration of the trends that are converging and may disrupt your industry. Leaders often default to generating vision statements that often fail to inspire. Yet, employees and team members crave vision and knowing how their work and longer-term career paths connect to that of the group or entire company. Vision statements were never enough to motivate collective action. while a mission statement may describes why your organization exists, vision can’t be captured in vision statement. The course examines how companies like AARP, Patagonia, Amazon and others use future-back planning, strategic foresight, visioning and long-term thinking to create a north star that pulls leaders up up from the inertia of day to day execution. We will explore the power of and dangers in analogy that held Microsoft back from growth. The course will also examine how nonprofit health care platforms like the Mayo Clinic engages in strategic planning that employs codified beliefs about the future (“the patient will see you now) and how they are looking fifty years into the future of healthcare.

  • 0 reviews

    4 weeks, 2-3 hours a week, 2-3 hours a week

    View details

    A big picture, clear, long-term vision for any organization (start up or incumbent organization) is crucial for guiding all decision-making. However, translating that vision into overarching business goals, metrics and derived product road maps requires dedicated effort and a well-thought-out strategy. Company performance is either hindered or enabled by a set of connected systems, policies and behaviors that will either accelerate towards the vision or create significant resistance or worse.

    One effective way to align an organization's operations with its vision is by implementing a an organizational architecture template that centers around what we call the four key pillars: performance measurement and setting goals, team structures, org charts and empowerment, rewards and incentives, and corporate culture. These pillars are grounded in a micro-economic understanding of human behavior and are essential for fostering long-term growth and performance. It is important that they are all balanced and work together in harmony. Product development that’s faithful to the vision and big ideas will either be met with four pillars that enable successful new products to thrive or damage your brand with all stakeholders like Wells Fargo did.

    One example of a leader who successfully applied this approach is CEO Satya Nadella of Microsoft. By focusing on these four pillars, he was able to transform the company into one of the most valuable in the world. Too often leaders simply change an element of culture or a piece of performance evaluation and there is a breakdown. Satya reset Microsoft’s business model through a go to market strategy as he optimized the four pillars. Once in place, Microsoft began to unleash an effective product strategy that now rivals Apple’s and routinely encourages product plans that are bold with outstanding user experiences.

    When starting to map out a strategy to bring your company closer to its vision, it's important not to jump straight into planning and execution. Instead, it's crucial to first develop a deep understanding of your target customers, as well as a strong connection to your company's values. For product management to thrive all four pillars must work in accord with one another.

    Only with this understanding and connection can you create a framework that is aligned with the vision statement and big ideas that must get done—- and that the team can buy into and rally around.

    It's important to be mindful of the relationships between the different components of the framework, as well as how they interact with each other. The corporate culture, for example, needs to be aligned with the incentives and rewards systems, which in turn must support the team structures and goals. Every piece of the framework must be grounded in customer needs and in sync to ensure that it is functioning properly and bringing the organization closer to its vision. Prioritization comes when the four pillars reinforce one another.

    Product teams and sales teams seek to be motivated by a thoughtful structure like the 4 pillars that unleashes product differentiation and delights the target audience.


Taught by

Daniel Forrester

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