How do you co-create a product vision within your company?
A case study from our experiment in Glovo
As UX Researchers at Glovo, we are constantly dedicated to delivering value both to our stakeholders by facilitating business results and most importantly, to our users. The type of research we’ve been pursuing with an equal balance of speed, quality and care has been so far mostly tactical, with a gradually increasing injection of strategic bites.
That’s why my colleague Mariana Itza de Miguel and I were recruited by our Customer Product Director and Engineering Director to leverage our Service Design background in helping shape the co-creation of the Product Vision and Product Mission. In our two articles, we’ll show you the process, steps, learnings and tools we applied with positive results so that you can leverage this format within your company too!
If you’d like to take a deep dive into our Product Mission case study experience, check out this article written by my colleague Mariana Itza de Miguel
What is a Product Vision?
The Product Vision focuses on where you want your product to be in the future, 3–5 years down the road. It’s a concise statement able to inspire everyone involved in product development, to create a meaningful product. unleashing value. Why should you have one? Below are the top 3 benefits:
- 🧭 Helps orientate decision making, think of it as your compass
- 🌟 Motivates talent and represents a north star to strive for
- 🎯 Guides resources and effort prioritisation on what’s key to pursue
Our process
Leveraging this source article as a baseline, we tweaked our process and exercises into a custom approach that would work best for us. Below is a summary of our Product Vision set up as an inspiration:
Participants: 15. Our CEO, VPs, Product Managers/Engineering Managers and domain-specialised leaders (Design, UX Research, Data etc.)
Groups: 2. In the same Miro board and each equipped with the following:
- 1 facilitator and 1 co-facilitator
- 1 designer with visual recording/storytelling skills
Timeline:
- 2 weeks for preparation (gather material, prepare assets, create momentum and book everyone’s schedule)
- 2 weeks for execution (spreading out the 5-day original process set-up to give us more margin)
Tools: Miro and Zoom (or equivalents)
Phase 1: ‘Explore the now’ workshop (~2 hours)
Intro [15 mins]
To kick off the session, our Customer Product Director shed light on a selection of key qualitative and quantitative data from previous research studies to equip participants with a customer lens to approach the session. After this, participants split into 2 separate breakout rooms.
Exercise 1: Customer Journey As-Is [35 mins]
How it works 📝
1) The facilitator sets the stage and gives an overview of the High-Level Journey structure and pre-filled phases to give the group a direction.
2) Participants get time to complement the Journey by filling in additional input — on post-its — based on their expertise (key steps; gains; pains).
3) Participants review the output generated individually and silently.
4) Participants get assigned 4 votes each: 2 votes to be assigned to the top 2 gains and 2 for the top 2 pains, from their perspective.
5) The facilitator assesses voting outcome and highlights the top voted items.
Tips 💡
- Partially pre-fill the Journey before the session as a collaborative effort across departments/domains: share the link of your artefact some time in advance and ask colleagues to add comments crafting a solid start
- Add a ‘parking lot’ for the facilitator to add topics delaying the agenda or deviating discussion while making sure they’ll be captured for follow-ups
- Consider a time margin per activity in your agenda for potential questions and clarifications needed before starting with an activity
- Add a music background whenever an activity will take participants longer than 3–4 minutes, it gives a kick of good vibes for success
Red flag 🚨
- Avoid stress by putting time management out of participants’ hands. Example: if they have 8 mins to complete the journey — 2 mins of mapping per phase — as a facilitator, either put multiple Miro timers of 2 mins to scan time for them or verbally notify participants every 2 mins
- Find a sweet spot for engagement by mixing the ‘together alone’ approach to minimise discussions where participants work silently, with calibrated mic-on interactions. Example: ask one or two participants only to share their takeaways instead of the whole group.
Exercise 2: Product Value Proposition [30 mins]
How it works 📝
1) The facilitator fills in the ‘Customer profile’ area of the canvas on the right with known information gathered from the previous Customer Journey exercise, to build upon it: key steps become the ‘Customer Jobs’ and the most voted ‘Pains’ & ‘Gains’. For more info, see the canvas and explanatory video here
2) Participants brainstorm sequentially on potential ‘Gain Creators’ and ‘Pain Relievers’, considering one ‘Gain’ or ‘Pain’ at a time for the team to focus on.
3) Participants take a few minutes to review the mapping output silently.
4) Participants vote on the top ‘Gain Creators’ & ‘Pain Relievers’, and the facilitator comments and highlights the results for alignment.
Tips 💡
- Schedule a break between the Customer Journey and this exercise, so that the co-facilitator can have a time gap to fill in the information for the ‘Customer Profile’ section (Customer Jobs, Pains and Gains) and participants come back with renewed energy.
- Prepare a draft of the ‘Customer Jobs’ aside— only content you can anticipate — based on your pre-session Journey draft: in case of changes after the mapping complementation by participants, just adapt accordingly. At least you’ll have a base to play around with for speed’s sake!
Red flag 🚨
- Do not take terminology for granted — not every participant will be familiar with the key definitions, so keep them handy. Example: paste somewhere visible what ‘Gain Creator’ and ‘Pain Reliever’ mean
Exercise 3: Glovo today in 3 emojis [15 mins]
How it works 📝
1) Each participant claims a spot in the canvas by adding their name.
2) Participants each select 3 emojis that best represent the organisation in the present.
3) Participants present the meaning of their selection in turns and get given 2 votes to select the combination visually capturing best their organisation.
4) The facilitator reviews and highlights the outcome, giving the stage to the winner for an extra reflection on the ‘why’ behind the combination.
Tips 💡
- Leverage emoji shortcuts. Instruct your participant to use either the keyboard or the embedded Miro plug-in. More on the plug-in here
- Introduce a quality-proof screener question for participants to test the message of their visual combination. Example: Would you feel confident sharing these emojis to represent the brand outside our organisation?
Red flag 🚨
- Beware of the visual meaning across different cultures. Remind participants to go for emojis with a strong, straight forward message, with no room for controversial interpretations.
Speed Highlights and Wrap-up [15 mins]
At this point, both groups got back to the main call and one representative from each group pitched the key highlights of the co-creation undertaken in each break out room. Once aligned and on the same page, we wrapped up the session outlining the next workshop to come.
Phase 2: ‘Future state’ workshop (~2 hours)
Intro [15 mins]
This time, when getting back to our Product Vision co-creation after a couple of days in between, it was important to refresh participants’ minds and recap the key highlights of the ‘Explore the now’ session. Additionally, some future-oriented trends have been presented to serve as inspiration for the session. After this, participants split into 2 separate breakout rooms.
Exercise 1: Customer Journey To-Be [35 mins]
How it works 📝
1) The facilitator sets the stage and gives an overview of the high-level Journey completed together during the ‘Explore the now’ session.
2) Participants are asked this time to claim a spot with their name on a dedicated swim lane and add up to 7 steps to capture the ideal Journey To-Be, 3–5 years down the road, individually.
3) Participants review the output generated individually and silently or — depending on time — briefly share their stories in turns.
4) Participants get assigned 2 votes each to select the top 2 To-Be Journeys best representing the future product experience, from their perspective.
5) The facilitator assesses the top-voted To-Be Journey flow, giving the ‘winner’ the mic to describe the flow more in detail.
Tips 💡
- Add one example to read through before having participants come up with their own output: a futuristic and creative reference will help participants ideate an out-of-the-box journey.
Red flag 🚨
- Avoid participants getting stuck by steering them toward the pain points previously identified in the As-Is flow: How could these moments of friction be smoothed out in the To-Be flow? How could the trends mentioned as inspiration in the intro play a role there?
Exercise 2: Postcard from the future [30 mins]
How it works 📝
1) The facilitator creates a bridge between the To-Be Journey and this build-up exercise, thanks to a pre-filled postcard example. Now that the team voted on a specific To-Be Journey to focus on, it’s time to imagine being there, 3–5 years down the road: What kind of impact will the organisation have on customers’ life? More info on this exercise here
2) Participants are asked to empathise with this future state To-Be and write a postcard to a friend or family member about how the organisation is helping them in the future, as a customer.
3)Participants are also asked to find a cover image for their postcard to convey an extra layer of information shaping this future context, in a fun way!
4) Participants review everyone else’s postcard and get assigned 2 votes each to select the top 2 postcards that best represent the ideal customer’s experience of the chosen To-Be Journey, from their perspective.
5) The facilitator assesses the top-voted postcard, giving the ‘winner’ the mic to describe its meaning more in detail.
Tips 💡
- Leverage image search shortcuts: instruct your participant to use the embedded Google Images Miro plug-in, for example.
Red flag 🚨
- Minimise friction and effort for participants. Their focus should be on content, nothing else. Example: when it comes to adding the postcard text, have a post-it placeholder for them to start typing immediately, no text box to create from scratch, no brainer.
Exercise 3: Glovo in the future in 3 emojis [15 mins]
☝🏽 Refer back to the same exercise in the previous session, simply replacing the present state with the future state, this time.
Speed Highlights and Wrap-up [15 mins]
☝🏽 Refer back to the same dynamics as in the previous session.
Channel output into a statement & storyboard
Convergence
After the two cross-disciplinary workshops above, a smaller group — including key decision-makers and visual storytellers — ended up digesting and converging the rich, broad output obtained by that point, into a consolidated Product Vision statement and Storyboard.
Feedback/Testing
Both artefacts were then shared more broadly across the company for asynchronous feedback as a way to challenge, polish, complement and therefore ‘test’ them before releasing the final versions.
Dissemination
After multiple rounds of iteration, the final output was shared in a company presentation to showcase the result of this collaborative process. The Customer Cluster is now able to better orientate decision making, motivate talent, guide resources, and prioritise efforts, in both the short and long term.
To conclude…
Co-creating a Product Vision by leveraging the talent and domains of expertise you own can really help you to up your game when shaping your product roadmap, as well as improving your mindset and drive in pursuing it as a company. UX Researchers — trained to unleash empathy, connect the dots and foster relationships across silos, can serve as strategic assets to facilitate such a scale of conversations and beyond, for alignment and cohesion.
Good luck organising YOUR Product Vision co-creation, we hope you’ll have as much fun as we did!
If you’d like to take a deep dive into our Product Mission case study experience, check out this article written by my colleague Mariana Itza de Miguel
Thanks to our co-facilitators Julian della Mattia & Meltem Naz Kaso ⚡️
And by the way, we are hiring! If you think Glovo might be your next challenge, check out our Careers page or Linkedin. ✨
References
Thanks for reading! 💛 If you have feedback to share, feel free to say hello 👋
