Dear Dave,
Last week a designer asked me: what makes a good design vision?
This comes up often. “Vision” can feel lofty and intangible, even though developing vision is a standard expectation in senior product roles, hand-in-hand with driving strategy. Still, approaching vision work is daunting: where to begin? What to deliver? To who, by when, who cares?
Templates for this particular task come and go. Most visions take a few tries before reaching a canonical ‘final form’; even then, they fall out of date and get rebuilt anew.
Because a vision is a chapter in the story of a product, not the whole book.
The scale varies —1 a vision might zoom in on one problem, or look across the whole company — but its still a chapter we haven’t gotten to yet; it advocates for a direction to build towards. Once we start doing so, we’re already flipping the pages, wondering what comes next.
Stay somewhere long enough and you start to see this happening at the organizational level.
At Wealthsimple, I joined at a time when the vision was democratizing wealth through managed investing: diversified ETFs that help you ‘get rich slow’. As the market demanded access to more tools, we expanded into trading and crypto. This wasn’t in chapter one, but the story widened: get rich your way, with a balance of investment types.
While the vision grew, it stayed anchored to a north star: making investing accessible to a new generation, without the barriers of traditional banking. Everything else was iteration.2
Within design, we’re often afforded the opportunity to make visions legible — to do the showing that brings the telling to life. And at our best, we pull vision up ourselves from the customer and product knowledge that shapes all the small decisions we make daily, to form something bigger.
So what makes a good vision isn’t the artefacts — though those are worth plenty, and their quality is a bellwether for the quality of your thinking. Its whether the vision positively shapes how the product is perceived by the real people who use it. The plot moves forward, and the hero — the user — moves with it.
Internally, a good vision goes viral3. People ask for the link. It gets shared in rooms you’re not in. It answers pressing questions about where we’re heading next, and inspires new ones about whats possible after that.
So if a vision is a chapter, it takes some pressure off. You’re not writing the whole book. You’re building on a foundation, with more to come after your part. I’ve worked on many visions, and seen them fail, flourish, and eventually get remixed and rewritten.
The first step is to figure out the shape of the chapter: the piece of the story we need to change now, and why. What new forces are at play in our hero’s world, driving us to need to do something differently?
Define the plot points that matter, with whatever tools are best for the job, within some reasonable constraints on time, and certainly not alone. The form it needs to take to make sense to others — ⚠️ intentional hand-waving ahead ⚠️ — will become clear along the way.
Finally, I will leave you with my personal favourite vision ever articulated4:
This is part 1 of 2; next post I’ll share my perspective on the qualities of an effective vision and some examples of tactics I’ve seen work well in practice.
From scream-singing Unwritten by Natasha Beddingfield, because the rest really is still unwritten(nnnnnn🎶),
Danielle.
This and all em dashes artisanally hand-typed by me — I miss ‘em. I’m taking ‘em back. See what I did there? Claude could never.
Try this for yourself: write the chapter title for the vision your org’s leadership has shared each year (or quarter in some cases). What I think you’ll find is that underneath the twists, pivots, redos and undos, the story kept building on itself, with a clear through-line across chapters.
Ick, so sorry, but it is an apt description!
I love Project Runway, so very much.