• Recently, I started to feel stronger and stronger deja vus running into the topic of vision and mission in multiple situations. Firstly, while on vacation, I somehow decided to re-read Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why?” which writes mostly about finding your vision (your dream, your “Why?”). Later (back to work), our team had an initial run of training based on VMOSA framework (as part of product-mindset training). Later on the same day, in an initial organizational team meeting for a new product (a testing conference!) we are building, some interesting questions (or edge-cases) occurred, and as we had a clear vision defined it helped us a lot in dealing with those questions right away. Finally, the topic of vision reappeared this week as I had a chance to participate in a Domain-Driven Design course (probably, the topic of DDD itself deserves a separate blogpost…) in a form of Product Vision Board and Product Strategy Canvas.

  • To understand some abstract concepts better, I like to look into some concrete example. To be honest, I was looking into Apple’s vision and mission statements (probably, that is the influence of Simon Sinek as he refers to Apple a lot in his stories).

    Vision statement: “to make the best products on earth and to leave the world better than we found it.” Ambitious enough?
    Mission statement: “to bring the best user experience to customers through innovative hardware, software, and services.”

    Let’s try to generalize:
    Vision statement: “{dream/your why?/delta or difference}”
    Mission statement: “{action/your what?} through {action vector/scope/your how?}”

  • But if you want some good articles, probably, it could be difficult to find more solid ones that Marty Cagan’s pieces about “Product Vision vs. Mission” (with a collection of real world examples), “Vision vs. Strategy” and “Focus”.

  • Talking about visionaries and interesting ideas - it feels like a lot of controversial ideas (sometimes even taken out of their contexts) tend to become popular short viral videos (a.k.a. reels). Some ideas feel so controversial that they simply make the listener (me) find the full video just to explore bigger picture challenging the full context and/or my own beliefs. That is exactly what happened when I noticed some visionary talking about 1-1s being a bad practice that is being discouraged in their organization. And these were words of Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA (for 30+ years and counting) in an interview with Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe (who hosts an amazing podcast, as I found out later). An interview was captivating and I tried making some notes, so here they go:
    • Keynote performance review, highlighting impact, vision. Vision, once again.
    • Building great things requires suffering, pain and struggle (passion is not what makes you happy).
    • 60 direct reports (and how it is not conventional yet the best practice in the context). How 1-on-1s are discouraged. Firing (giving up) vs “Torture them into greatness”.
    • Work life balance. “I work as much as I can”. Can you have both passion and work life balance?
    • 0 billion dollar markets. Achieving what has never been done before.
    • NVIDIA CUDA toolkit story. Initial failure and sustaining belief (for 10+ years).
    • Another industrial revolution. AI breakthrough, AGI, AI in daily life of NVIDIA, etc.
    • Jensen Huang’s amazing complimenting skills :)

    • Encoding a lot of magic, pain, joy, knowledge into team, and not willing to reset (quit).

    • …
  • For the point #5 I was planning to switch from dreaming (of vision) to executing/doing and introduce mindstorming technique from Brian Tracy. However, recommending a self-claimed self-made millionaires consultant does not sound right - it sounds sketchy, fishy and scammy. On the other hand, once one have a clear vision they can land with completely different solution than they were expecting after trying out the options. So, maybe “mindstorming” can work - it is the matter of experimenting and, probably, failing fast (before overinvesting).