Vision must be tangible and visual, not abstract words

If you and your team do your job correctly, what does the world look like?

We lean heavily into designing and prototyping even before a project gets a green light.

Stop focusing as much on what you want to say and focus more on what you want your audience to remember.

The strategy doc wouldn't be complete without wireframes. When you talk about strategy in words alone, everyone takes away a different interpretation of that strategy, whereas when you actually can show people wireframes of what the product will look like when that strategy is implemented, it creates much more alignment.

The vision needs to be lofty, realistic, devoid of any tech or limitations of today, and grounded in a very clear and potent problem. User problem.

You can only remember one thing out of a talk. That one thing is your arrow - literally a single sentence that is the only sentence people would remember if they left your talk.

If you just describe your strategy in words, people might come up with one nav bar that's completely different than another nav bar. And as a result, you then find that the moment that you're implementing your mobile app, that there's completely different perceptions of what's valuable to the company.

Do they know their cathedral? Do they have a cathedral? And then he explained the cathedral story... you want your teams to feel like they're building a cathedral and not laying bricks.

Everybody needs to see a different facet of the cathedral. So very often people will do a great writeup on vision or strategy or whatever it is and the result is people can't quite see their version of what this broader arc is or this broader cathedral is.

Reach for the stars and land on the moon. Vision work that absolutely does look at the entirety of the experience, a comprehensive approach, a journey approach, and thinks about how these various things may come together to be better, and sketch out the ideal version.

Regardless of what level you are in the company. So people say, 'Oh, I'm just a junior PM.' Whatever level, there is some micro macro vision that you need to have.

I think about three concentric circles. So the core of your vision is your team. And I want to make sure my team understands the vision because I'm basically saying, 'Get on this boat, we're sailing to the vision.'

There's two ways of planning. You can dream of what is the perfect vision of the future, what future do you want to exist in, and then working from there, which is completely improbable, a completely crazy big dream. The alternate is you can look at the bricks around you and say, 'What can I do with these bricks?'

The thing that I love about a crazy big goal is that you feel completely inadequate before it. You want to work really hard to will it into existence.

I like to just close my eyes and imagine the future as far out as I can. It's like five years from now, 10 years from now, whatever. And develop a really salient picture of what that looks like.

Each quarter... how do I imagine the company and the product is going to be different and better for our customers in a quarter from now? And from that, walk it backwards. But if you are just saying, 'We'll have better security. We'll have better performance. We'll have less bugs. We'll have more enhancements to,' I don't know, 'this and this feature,' it's not enough.

Step one is, am I working at a place and in a product area in which I have a tremendous amount of passion? Because for me, that is the fuel and the motivation that helps me break through to getting the strategy.