Product & Engineering Execution Without Vision and Strategy
Product and engineering execution without vision and strategy is like navigating a ship without a purpose, leading to confusion, poor execution, and wasted resources. The underlying structure of a successful organization hinges on a clear direction and a strategic approach, which guide everything from overarching goals to daily tasks.
Things roll downward
In most companies, especially in a software company, decisions and execution tend to flow from the top down. This means that the company’s vision sits at the highest level. The company’s strategy to execute that vision follows, and everything else flows from these two elements, all the way down to the software code written and deployed by the developers. All lower-level decisions are determined by the high-level vision and strategy.
Ideally, the flow would look something like this: it starts with a vision > the market and the vision shape the company strategy > the company strategy dictates marketing, sales, and product strategies > the product strategy informs the product and technical designs > these designs then guide the product and technical roadmaps > these roadmaps directly influence the engineering execution > the engineering execution delivers customer value.
This is illustrated in the diagram below:
Confusion at the Vision and Strategy Level Leads to Confusion in Product and Engineering Execution
In startups and early-stage companies, the vision and strategy are less solidified. In some cases, it can take years for a software company to nail down its vision and strategy. Additionally, even when both the vision and strategy are solid, companies sometimes need to perform pivots due to market changes and demands. In other cases, pivots are not necessary, but expansions are needed in additional market verticals or different markets altogether.
Regardless of the situation, a company’s vision and strategy are dynamic elements. They constantly evolve if the business is to grow and thrive. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. The problem occurs when the leadership team is confused about their vision and strategy. Because decisions and execution tend to flow from the top down, if the leaders are confused, the rest of the company will be too, including Product and Engineering. This will ultimately result in poor execution, extensive rework, thrashing, and wasted effort, time, and money.
It is important to distinguish between being confused about one’s vision and strategy and intentionally experimenting to narrow it down. Confusion is usually created by a lack of intentional effort to create, communicate, and maintain a clear vision and strategy. Experimentation and discovery, on the other hand, are a phase where a solid vision and strategy may not yet exist, but there are intentional efforts to define both.
For example, I recently spoke to the CEO of a startup whose vision was different when she first started the company compared to two years later. While the team originally started in one direction, they discovered through experimentation and discovery that the market needed something else. Once they figured out the real need, their vision and strategy changed quite drastically. This is a normal and healthy pattern. The problem arises when there is little clarity and no intentionality to change it.
Optimizing Product and Engineering Execution Without Vision and Strategy
Optimizing Product and Engineering execution without having a clear company vision and strategy is like getting the car ready for a trip without knowing where we are going. It’s like purchasing gear for an expedition without knowing its destination.
Maybe some road trips don’t have a particular destination or route in mind and the main goal is to just travel around for a while. Nevertheless, that trip still has to have a vision and strategy, which could look like this:
Vision
To spend 3 months driving around the Western United States, visiting natural wonders, without a strict agenda and with freedom to choose destinations on the fly.
Strategy
Make the trip as budget friendly as possible by camping and not eating out as much as possible. Take our hybrid engine car, the rooftop tent, coolers for food storage, and camping cookware.
It is clear that the vision determines the strategy and the strategy, all the preparations and small decisions leading up to the trip.
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3 Steps to Improve Product and Engineering Execution With Company Vision and Strategy
Writing this article feels like its content is so commonsensical that perhaps it doesn’t need to be written at all. However, not every company makes the effort to complete the three simple steps outlined below. At the same time, executing all of them will go a long way toward improving Product and Engineering execution.
1. Write it Down in a Single Source of Truth
Most companies document their vision and strategy in the form of a slide deck. This is usually done shortly before an all-company meeting and soon after a leadership off-site. In the next quarter or planning cycle, a new slide deck presentation is created with some updates. This process repeats quarter after quarter and year after year, resulting in multiple slide deck copies circulating through emails, chats, Google Drives, and so on. It doesn’t take long before even the leadership team becomes confused about which copy is the latest and most updated.
A better approach is to have the vision and strategy documented in a single source. This means that there is one master copy of it. Whether it is a slide deck, a simple text document, or another type of document is irrelevant. The important thing is that there is one copy, which evolves with the company.
2. Share it and Make it Easily Accessible
To continue the scenario from the previous point, this is how many leadership teams share the vision and strategy with the rest of the company:
They share the slide deck in a grandiose presentation during the all-company meeting, which usually takes place once a quarter. All the employees see it, some ask questions, and the next day, everyone moves on. In many cases, no one discusses it for the next three months. In some cases, some leaders make reference to it during the following quarter, but unless they share the slide deck visuals again, the employees are working off of quickly fading memory.
The vision and strategy not only need to be in a single source of truth document and shared more than once a quarter, but also be easily found and accessible to all employees in the company. That way, any employee can refer to it anytime they need to refresh their memory and understand how their day-to-day efforts contribute to the company’s goals.
3. Review Regularly with Enough Lead Time
Typically, most software companies review their vision and strategy and apply adjustments on a regular cadence. The leadership team will gather, sometimes go to an off-site, and dive deep to come up with new priorities. A week later, Product and Engineering will do planning based on the off-site’s outcome, and shortly after, there will be an all-company meeting. However, the few days between the off-site and the planning effort are not enough to create realistic plans. Everyone stresses out because there is insufficient time to answer all the new questions that arose from the off-site. Now, Product and Engineering are pressed to make quick decisions and plans with incomplete information.
I have worked at a place where this was the case, and it was very stressful. Therefore, we applied the following change: the leadership off-site was pulled a quarter earlier. This meant that every quarter we gathered somewhere to work on our vision and strategy, we were looking two quarters ahead and creating priorities for at least three months later. That created a large window for Product and Engineering to use the immediate next quarter to conduct research and find answers to all the questions, then go into planning after at least three months of research and preparation. This is a much better approach, which removes stress and avoids the need to make important decisions with little or no information.