The Product Experience

A better way to share your product vision - Janet Bumpas (Product Advisor)

• Mind the Product

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Join us this week on The Product Experience podcast as we sit down with Janet Bumpas, a veteran Product Advisor with a wealth of experience in both startups and large corporations, to unravel the secrets behind creating compelling product visions.

Featured Links: Follow Janet on LinkedIn | Janet's website | 'How to find out what your customers want' feature by Janet Bumpas at Mind The Product

Our Hosts
Lily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.

Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Lily Smith:

Hello and welcome back to the Product Experience Podcast. This week I talk to Janet Bumpus, Product Advisor, all about her innovative new way to create and communicate your product vision. The Product Experience Podcast is brought to you by Mind, the Product part of the Pendo family. Every week we talk to inspiring product people from around the globe family.

Randy Silver:

Every week we talk to inspiring product people from around the globe. Visit mindtheproductcom to catch up on past episodes and discover free resources to help you with your product practice. Learn about Mind, the Product's conferences and their great training opportunities.

Lily Smith:

Create a free account to get product inspiration delivered weekly to your inbox. Mind, the Product supports over 200 product type meetups from New York to Barcelona. There's probably one near you. Hi, janet, really nice to meet you. Welcome to the Product Experience Podcast Awesome. So before we get started on our topic and we're going to talk about product vision it would be great if you could give our audience or myself a quick intro to who you are and what you're doing in product these days.

Janet Bumpas:

Okay, so I am from San Francisco, california, where I was a part of three different startups One went public, one was acquired by eBay, paypal, back when they were one company, and one crashed and burned hard. So I joke, if you see me flinch, that will probably be scars left over from that one. And then I came over here to Europe about seven years ago and I worked I embedded with a team with Phillips, that was launching a new product, the OneBlade I don't know if you've ever heard of that, it's a shaver device, male shaving and they wanted to say, hey, can we apply some of these Silicon Valley rapid experimentation and testing things with it? So I joined a team to launch that product. And then I went and worked with an accelerator program and a startup support program and now I'm an independent coach, trainer and advisor.

Lily Smith:

Nice and we program, and now I'm an independent coach, trainer and advisor, nice and we're going to talk about product vision. So give me your kind of like how do you describe what a product vision is to your mom?

Janet Bumpas:

um, yeah, my mom doesn't know what I do. Yeah, um, but I would say product vision is the beating heart of any strong, great product and it's not like oftentimes people are like. Our vision is to be number one in the market. It's nothing like. It's not your market share, your market cap, your revenue. It's not like your features or the cool things your product can do. It's really what impact do you want to have on a customer's life Like? Go out like three, five, 10 years, depending on like kind of what the product situation is and say what is it that you want customer experience to be with, like when they're using your product, and what job are you going to get done for the customer and how are you going to make that customer's life better?

Lily Smith:

Do you have any examples of really good product visions or visions that you think are great?

Janet Bumpas:

Yeah, so I do both. It's funny so if with it I do, is something called a product vision sprint sometimes, where we do it all within one week and sometimes with a large corporate it might take two or three months and it's the same process. But a lot of it is dependent. In big corporate You've got like a lot of different stakeholders and things just kind of move slower and in a small scale up you can be like, okay, let's take 10 people, put ourselves in a room for a week with you know a thousand post-it notes and we can probably come up with it. Of course, garbage in, garbage out, so they have to be really prepared. So I make them send me like, send me your all your customer personas and like your customer journeys and what you know about that to see like if you're ready to do this. So we do that.

Janet Bumpas:

I did one with a company here, Movo Medical.

Janet Bumpas:

They are an awesome scale up here in the Netherlands. They are working with dementia care for elder patients and there's a big nursing shortage now. So nurses are overwhelmed. It's a hard, hard job. It's a thankless job and a lot of their time is actually spent running around making sure at night like people are not wandering around just for the safety of everybody, the patients especially, and so they have a sensor that's underneath the bed that will alert the nurses when people are moving around, and that's just their first product that they're thinking of. There's a lot of other things that they can do, and so we spent a week mapping out what this customer vision would look like in five, 10 years time, Like how would it be the nurse's experience? We take it all from the nurse's point of view because they really want to focus on making a nurse's life easier, because there's such a shortage of nurses and it's such a hard job. And so what would an ideal nurse experience be like, with these products, helping her work in this care?

Lily Smith:

And what are you allowed to share. What the product vision? Is it a single statement or is?

Janet Bumpas:

it a page no. So I am a huge fan of storyboards. I can be a little bit of a geek and give you the history with storyboards here. So Walt Disney was the first one who kind of you know really well I mean, storyboards have been around for a time immemorial, but he really pioneered use of storyboards when he made the movie Snow White. It was the first fully animated movie. It was kind of a bet the company type situation for Disney. It was a big, complex project and everybody all the designers, everybody started to spin out, not really sure where we were going. And so he said let me just storyboard out what the entire experience will be like. And then Snow White was a fantastic success, the movie they made off of that In 2011, I think.

Janet Bumpas:

Airbnb said, hey, we want to borrow that technique and we're going to make a storyboard. And at that point in time, airbnb, like they'd started scaling, but like they hadn't gotten super big yet and they were deciding like what is our next move? Like what should we do? They were thinking like maybe we should like go into office spaces we don't know, maybe we should have a mobile app, like mobile was just starting to get big. So like we don't know. Is that the way it's going? So they storyboarded out. They had a project called Snow White and they storyboarded out the customer experience and they realized during this process holy cow, so much of that experience happens when a customer is, like you know, getting into their Airbnb at 11 o'clock at night and the key doesn't work and the punch code doesn't work and like what do they do? You're not in front of your desktop. So they knew they needed to go mobile and so that helped them make that decision. So since then, they had the advantage of they got a storyboard artist from Pixar.

Janet Bumpas:

I have a freelancer in New York, but we show up with an illustrator, I show up with an illustrator and we storyboard out what the experience we wanted to be. And I love the visual aspect of it because we process in our brains images so much faster. It's universal. For some reason I'm running into a bunch of people who have dyslexia and ADD and have a hard time reading. So, really, and it conveys the story and I see some product visions are like make commerce easy and I'm like that's not a story. What do I do with that? Does that mean I make it like universal? Do I go deep, do I like work on the onboarding thing? But if you have a storyboard that walks you through this is the experience we're trying to build it's much easier to align teams.

Lily Smith:

That's really interesting. I've not heard of a product vision being a visual yeah, a visual representation of like your your product's future.

Janet Bumpas:

I know it's one of the challenges, because I go out and I'm like all excited. I'm like I want to talk about product vision and I'll talk to companies. They're like oh yes, we have one. Our slogan is make commerce easy. Our product vision is that and I'm like you know I don't want to be rude, but I'm like that's not a product vision so how and how do you do, how do you go through that education piece with the company I?

Janet Bumpas:

don't know I'm stumbling blindly and, you know, flailing. No, I just start talking about how I think it should be done and most people's eyes glaze over. But you know only 5% are like yeah, that does make sense to me. Like one client I work with is like I've never liked written documents because you know people stress out and like fight over the exact wording of it and you know we want the vision to be. You know, we don't know everything in it. We don't know exactly how we're going to do everything. So we can't like we knew all that, it would be a roadmap, right, so there's some, but with exactly how we're going to do everything. So we can't like we knew all that, it would be a roadmap, right, so there's some, but with an image like we can do that we can say here's the emotion we want to convey, here's the aspect of it, and we can communicate that without wordsmithing and fighting over words.

Lily Smith:

And I guess, if your product vision is this more visual storytelling artifact rather than a slogan or a statement, yeah, do you find that people use it in a very different way as well, once they have it?

Janet Bumpas:

Yeah, and I was going to say it also depends on the personality of a company.

Janet Bumpas:

Like I know, like Amazon, they want a written document, like a you know, faq, which is kind of doing the same thing, it's going after the same thing. But they're like, and you know they said we don't want any PowerPoint presentations because you can like. You know they said we don't want any PowerPoint presentations because you can like, you know, schmooze us with your images. We want the facts, right. So this obviously would not work for them, right? But you know it came out of Airbnb, which is much more of a design Like let's talk, you know, images and feelings and emotions, so it kind of is a match for that company. But I have seen companies, you know some of them take the storyboard and they put it on a wall in their lobby and as you go in you can see it. So everybody, customers go in, you know, staff go in, everybody sees it every day as they walk in and out.

Janet Bumpas:

Another one was doing a big like convention, so they had a booth right and they're like oh yeah, we took tiles from our storyboard and put it around the booth and we're giving like little tchotchkes out. Each tchotchke would have like a tile from the storyboard on it and so they're using it to talk to customers saying like hey, this is where we're going. If you want to join this vision, if you want to join this journey, come with us. And it's a. You know, no one in a convention booth is going to read a four-page document, but like they'll do a cartoon yeah, a little.

Lily Smith:

A little storyboard. Yeah, I love it. So you mentioned before that. You know it either takes like a week you go into a room and work with a business and map out within a week what's that process look like.

Janet Bumpas:

Yeah, so the first day we kind of look at okay, let's go over, like customer personas and the current version, the current customer experience and journey map, and we set that all up and it's interesting, like when I did one, like you know, it's 10 people in the room and we've got people from all different parts of the business that you know, we've got the CTO there and we've got, you know, some customer support. People are really understanding the customer and the founder there. A lot of times in a smaller organization like this, it's so interesting because, like, the founder has a strong division in their head but all of a sudden they're growing to a size where the founder can't be there in every decision, right, and we need other people to be aligned. And also at the flip side of that, like this founder that when I worked with he was like wait, we're doing what? Oh my God, that's going on. Like he's finding out stuff about his own business because everybody has starting.

Janet Bumpas:

It's getting complex enough that everybody has a piece of the picture, and so we get it all out and, you know, on a board visual so we can see it all there and you sit there and yeah.

Janet Bumpas:

So then the second day we start thinking about like what would we want, the future vision, and we do a little bit of practice in learning how to tell a good story, because a lot of it is like you know an arc of the story and we work on that the third day, and then the fourth day we give the. You know, the designers always like you have to work with a special type of designer because you know most designers are used to like I am going to make the perfect line and the perfect arc in the curve and I'm like fast and furious, my friend, you get one day, yeah, curve. And I'm like fast and furious, my friend, you get one day. And a really good storyboard designer can also bring in like hey, when you're telling this, from this perspective, you need to think about this, and so they bring in a lot of the art and the illustration and the emotion of the story.

Janet Bumpas:

I modeled this off of a design sprint. So in a design sprint on Friday, you show it to, you know, you do experiment with it and show it to some customers. So our a design sprint on Friday, you show it to, you know, you do experiment with it and show it to some customers. So our version is we show it to a stakeholder, so you know if you're a scale up, maybe it's a big funder or board member or a customer, and get their feedback in it. And of course you know. So I call it one week, but of course the process doesn't end there. So they take that and then they, you know, have to digest and like iterate. I mean it's just the first pass.

Randy Silver:

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Lily Smith:

So when you're working on the product vision, quite often companies will have like a company vision that also then ties into like a business strategy. Yeah, like, how do you, how do all of these kind of pieces come together? And when you're considering the product vision like, right, how you know, is that fitting in with the company vision and what are you doing with the company strategy? At that point when you're discussing product vision, right, so the favorite product answer it depends.

Janet Bumpas:

So, like, if you're a small company with one product, your product vision is your company vision, right? If you're Google, like, clearly you can't have one product vision for AWS and YouTube, right, like. So it kind of depends on do we need to do separate visions for each product? And that just depends on where the company is at, how related their visions or their products are or their products are. But I look at it in the product world.

Janet Bumpas:

The product vision and then the product strategy is nothing more of my path, of how I'm going to accomplish my vision.

Janet Bumpas:

Right, and maybe we have to take some detours and work on, you know, spend some time working on improving our checkout flow. So, because you know we would get more cash that way, and we like cash because you know we like money, because it extends our runway and gives us more time to develop on that product vision. So I look at product strategy as my path to accomplish my product vision. There is also, when these things are being set. The product vision has inputs of, like what is the corporate strategy? Does the corporate want to, you know, grow 20% a year and be globally, universally, everywhere, or does it say hey, we're more about sustainability and want to just have a small business here that really impacts and grows in our community, or something like that. So those are all inputs into the product strategies, like what does a company want to accomplish? You know, what are our values, what are our principles, and we bring them all together and then we make the product strategy.

Lily Smith:

And let's touch a little bit on your background as well. So tell me a bit about how you became really good at this piece of work. How did you learn about how to kind of understand more about customers?

Janet Bumpas:

So I remember I was working at a startup that got bought by eBay, and so I was living in San Francisco and eBay is way far south in Silicon Valley, so taking the bus down there every day, and this was like the early 2000s and agile was coming on strong at this point in time and, like lean startup, it just started right. And I remember one day that our head of engineering, like the lead programmer, sat me down. He's like Janet, whatever you tell me to build, I will build it world-class. Like, we'll do user stories, we'll do pair programming, we will do Agile, retro, like everything. The problem is, you don't know what to build.

Janet Bumpas:

And I sat there at that time and I was kind of like she's kind of right, right. I was like how like this was before, like we was basically, you know, there was a team of three of us and we would sit around and be like no, no, I think we should do this Right and no, no, I think we should do that. And so that kind of set me off on a path to figure out like, what is it that customers want? And so I dove into deep into. My first step was the jobs to be done world, which in some ways is just like the most theoretically beautiful framework I've ever seen Execution that that does have some challenges.

Janet Bumpas:

And then I wandered over lean startup and started doing that a lot and design thinking and always trying to figure out what should we build right? It was a very uncomfortable, awkward moment way back then but it kind of set me off in a path to try to figure out what is it that we should build. And I guess that kind of leads into the product vision, because at the heart of it I'm trying to figure out what is it that we should build. I mean I joke like I can make it look beautiful on a storyboard and simple and clear, like the day-to-day life is super messy and super challenging.

Janet Bumpas:

right, I make it look easy, but I do think you need that clarity. Let's figure out what is it that you are going to build and how are you going to be a sustainable, profitable business?

Lily Smith:

Yeah, and I think that is like you say. That's the ultimate question for all product managers, isn't it? It's making sure, not even what is it I want to build or what is it I need to build. But what should I focus on first?

Janet Bumpas:

Right, the prioritization gets really like. This is where, like again, it gets very easy. At my level, like when you get into prioritization and like you know there's a you know a big fire or something going wrong that needs to be fixed and executive saying like hey, I had this great idea. Like telling that executive no right, all of that stuff, it gets really really hard. Like telling that executive no right, all of that stuff, it gets really really hard.

Lily Smith:

And do you find that, once you have that product vision set, that that can help with the prioritization piece?

Janet Bumpas:

as well, absolutely yes. It was funny. I was coaching a group. It was a group setting of scale-up founders and one of them it's funny because it started out most questions started out like, hey, we're having a hard time prioritizing and choosing what we should be doing and if you keep digging in underneath it, it's that they don't have a strong product vision and they don't have a strong direction.

Randy Silver:

Yeah.

Janet Bumpas:

And if you don't have a strong product vision, every path is viable. Right, and how do you choose what you're going to do? So what starts out like a company asking me like, hey, we're having a prioritization problem?

Lily Smith:

Oftentimes it comes down to you don't have a strong product vision, just thinking about who should be involved in creating that product vision or who should kind of own it. I guess this might be another one where it's like it depends, but when you are working on putting that together, like, who do you like to have in the room?

Janet Bumpas:

Yeah, so if it's going to be a product vision sprint where we lock ourselves in a room for a week, I would say no more than like eight, 10 people max. So I always put it back to the company hey, tell me who you want. And you know, I would like representation from technology and people who understand the customer. Of course, going back to it Depends. There's another company that I know that they're all fully remote but they do a quarterly offsite and so one of their quarterly offsites. They said, hey, we're going to work on a product vision and they wanted to use the process of working on a product vision in a way to like bring the whole company together. So they had everybody contributing, so they would break out little exercises that could be opened up to the wider audience.

Janet Bumpas:

And it takes. So for the founder in that situation it kind of takes a lot, because I think a fear of every founder is if I open this up to everybody, we're going to get something that I don't like and right all of a sudden you know we're going to be going in a direction that I don't like. So it was we opened it up to everybody to give input and then, at the end of the day, the founder could take that information and then go sit down and work with the, the illustrator, and like get a story that he really liked. That was a direction that he wanted to go. So he kind of gets like the super vote. So it kind of totally again it depends. It totally depends on what the personality of the company is and what the need is at the time.

Lily Smith:

And you kind of mentioned there about you know, some people having, I guess, a bigger voice in this. What if you capture your product vision but you need to make a change to that? You know you're going on a particular path and then you find you're not getting any traction, or you're going, you're getting data that shows that you're maybe going in the wrong direction. Yeah, Is that like a classic pivot, or is that?

Janet Bumpas:

I would say, yeah, I think it's a living document, so change it, yeah, right. The other scenario that I see is if it is something that like because you got a group consensus going for it, but the founder doesn't really like it, then you walk out of the room being like yes, this is what we're going to do, and so you really have to structure it so that people really buy into it and so really working. So it's not so much we get the input from everybody and it's not so much of a consensus thing, but we do have to have and again I'm talking about a scale up with a strong founder we have to have and again I'm talking about a scale up with a strong founder we have to have that a hundred percent commitment buy-in. Yeah.

Lily Smith:

What advice would you give to a product manager or a product leader who doesn't have a product vision and they want to put one in place, like, where should they start?

Janet Bumpas:

I'm going to give you a roundabout answer to this. Okay, so I started off doing these week-long product vision sprints and then there was some event that it was four hours. I had a four-hour slot and they're like Janet, can you do like something with all the founders of these 10 different companies? And they all came with like their CPOs and CTOs Can you do a product vision in four hours? And I was like, okay, so I tried to make a super, super fast version of this in four hours just more of a taster to get people understanding it. And I was all worried. I'm like is this innovation theater we're doing? Because I know the depth and the richness of sitting there in a week with a thousand post-it notes on the wall. But actually one of the founders then took that story that he created in those four hours and that became the basis of his commercial deck, his pitch deck. He raised $20 million off of that story and I was like, oh, okay, so there's something here. And then I brought it online and I teach it at Maven, which is a website where they do courses, and I do a four-hour product vision sprint. And one of the things I learned from that experience is doing it with a group of 10 founders is their feedback to each other is actually super helpful, and so what I was trying to do online is do the same four-hour process and getting people feedback from outside your company.

Janet Bumpas:

But what about this, right? So I find that interesting, but so I mean it's for that I developed a seven-step process and it's basically like it's for that. I developed a seven step process and it's basically like future customer what's our current journey? And then some exercises to expand your thinking out of like what could be possible. What are other companies doing, Like what would be? Airbnb has a technique, what's an 11 star experience? And then coming up with what your future version is, and then kind of doing a little like rearrangeance to storytelling techniques to make it a better story. And with the time pressure of, like you know, okay, 10 minutes go, which again part of my heart dies when I think we're going to do this in like 10 minutes, because there's a richness and there's a value in that, but people seem to like it and help it find it helpful.

Lily Smith:

Amazing, janet, thank you so much for joining us. And now no one has an excuse for not having a product vision, because you've told them all exactly how to do it.

Janet Bumpas:

Perfect, perfect Go. Make the world safe for product visions.

Lily Smith:

The Product Experience hosts are me, Lily Smith, host by night and chief product officer by day.

Randy Silver:

And me Randy Silver also host by night, and I spend my days working with product and leadership teams, helping their teams to do amazing work.

Lily Smith:

Luran Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.

Randy Silver:

And our theme music is from product community legend Arnie Kittler's band Pow. Thanks to them for letting us use their track. Thank you.