Inspired by a storytelling technique I learned from Dan Lawyer, I've used vision types at a bunch of different companies that I have been at. They can take a lot of different formats. I've been at some companies where they are where I've taken photos of like stick figure drawings that I've made on a whiteboard and I just, throw 10 of those into a slide deck and voice over them with a scripted story. I have done versions of this that are just the beginning of the document that don't have this rich detail at the end.

And I actually have to credit for the rich detail here. I have to give huge credit to the product designer who led this project with me named Raph D'Amico. He realized as we were putting together the story and the slides for the presentation (not seen here - slides 6-86), we knew that having the condensed version at the end would be helpful, but why not fill in with enough detail for us to go back to and work from throughout the year and use it as reference material? It was a great suggestion and has paid dividends ever since.

I've fallen in love with this format over time because I've seen it be useful in so many different contexts, but some of the ways that that folks generally might not expect it to be useful. One is I've seen it used to rally board members and potential investors around the vision for the company.

Another one of my favorite ways to use a visiontype is in recruiting. When I'm getting people excited about the open jobs that we have on our team, the product team, or even in engineering and marketing, we use the recording of this presentation as a way to introduce them to who's working on the team and what the vision for the company is. So that's a really cool added bonus of creating a visiontype in this format.

In addition to this digital copy, we actually printed out a comic book version of this. It's in a physical booklet that all of our teammates and new hires get a copy of.

I just ran a product offsite for the product team and our homework was to revisit the detailed version of the visiontype and come prepared with proposals and thoughts for what goes into the

 and the strategic playbook items that we want to think about for next year. Everybody was inspired and energized by the story and came up with great ideas for the product strategy for the future.

Another added bonus of creating a visiontype is to enable messaging and positioning work between the shared responsibility of the marketing team and the product team. I don't think it's always a perfectly linear process, but but it's certainly very collaborative.

After we created this visiontype, we were able to revamp messaging and positioning for the overall for the company. The visiontype paints the picture for the marketing team of where we are taking the product, so the messaging and positioning ideas that the marketing team comes up with can support this.

Before you get to the product strategy, one-slider, or the visiontype, one of the first things that you do in the process is establish the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) in the opportunity space that you're going after. "What problems are we going to solve for customers that ultimately are going to be represented in this visiontype?". That list of JTBD is very much a shared exercise with the marketing team.

And in fact, we had our initial set of JTBD that we came up with when we were creating this visiontype, but then the marketing team layered on their expertise and market data to help us refine that list. It's largely the same end-content, but we've refined how we talk about them and used that shared context of problems we're solving for customers. They're also using those JTBD along with the rich detail in the vision type to create their messaging and positioning proposals that they're now testing.

Raphael D'Amico

Vicky Thomas

This is a version of the visiontype we used to chart a path for the product through the next few years. It’s helped establish a roadmap for our product team but has also inspired board members, investors, new hires, and our marketing team.

Visiontype at Clockwise

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