Creating a strong, shared, solid, team vision is one of the first things you should do with your new team. Why? Because a team vision helps you inspire, motivate and energize everyone in the team to go the extra mile and accomplish great things. The title of this article is a great example of a team vision that helped a team see beyond the technical challenges and focus on the user. When the team could explain why they tried to build a new camera app, they could use their vision for any new idea they came up with. “Will this idea help the user become the world’s best photographer?” If the answer was “no”, they simply dropped the idea. When the answer was “yes!” they had to understand the reason behind the idea, by answering the even more interesting question; “Why will this idea make the user the world’s best photographer?“. When they had the answer to the question why, the whole team was dedicated and motivated to make the new idea come to life. In that way, it was easier for the team to decide on which ideas to use and which ideas didn’t give any specific value to the user. The team also used their vision to marketing themselves as a team. Their vision became their elevator pitch and even a non-technical person wanted to try it out and could understand it.
So, the million-dollar question and the reason why you are still reading this article is: How did we come up with this team vision? First, we divided our team of 15 persons into smaller groups of three to avoid social loafing (read more about social loafing in my article about team sizes). Why groups of three and not two or four? Well, first of all, 15 is not divisible by two or four. When two people cooperate there’s a larger risk that one of the two will take over and push through his or her ideas, leaving the other person outside and the result will not be united from the two. Four people will have too many ideas and there is also a risk that it will be tied voting, with two sub-groups. With three people in a group, no one can win without having at least one of the others on their side. Besides, if there is a conflict between the two of them, there is a third person who can settle the conflict and get the group moving in a common direction again. Thus, a group of three has the best chance of succeeding.
Ok, so we formed groups of three and answered a couple of questions. We started with these three:
What do we want to accomplish?
What problems do we want to solve?
What are we missing today?
Yes, we went right to the root questions. What do we actually want to accomplish and what problems do we need to solve? We want to answer these questions in an iterative way, and build a common understanding in the team where we improve our answers as we go along. After a while “Building a great camera” or “build a camera that everyone can use” have formed into “capture the moment”. We moved on with these two questions:
What does success mean to us?
What does our failure look like?
So if we want to “capture the moment” our camera app needs to start up quickly and the user should never be unsure of how to use it. But where lies the success in this? Maybe a popular app with many downloads, great reviews, or photos on Instagram taken with our app? If professional photographers are using our app and recommend it to others, it would probably mean we are successful. Talking about what a failure would look like led us to a camera that doesn’t start up in time to take the photo you want, or that it took bad photos which gave us bad user recommendations. These were just a few examples of situations we wanted to avoid. The next question is:
What measure can we use to determine our success?
The number of recommendations, downloads, happy users or posted photos on social media tagged with our app’s name? To find out what measure to use we probably needed to interact with our users. Just making a great camera was not enough. Do we need to release a beta version to a couple of our users and find out if our app can compete with the best camera app on the market? The discussion on the way to find those answers is actually as important as the answers. We took a short break from the discussion to boost our energy with fresh air and coffee. After the break we dealt with the last questions:
Who needs our solutions?
What do they want to accomplish?
In our previous discussions, we moved closer and closer to our users. Now it was time to make them real. Look our user in the eye and find out what she wants to accomplish. How can we make her awesome? When she looks at the photos she took with our app, we want her to feel proud as if the photos were taken by a professional photographer, even though she isn’t a professional photographer. All the advanced technology she has in her hands in our camera app will compensate for the knowledge she lacks and helps her take beautiful photos. We will make her the world’s best photographer!
When we finally came up with our team vision, our daily work was so much easier. Our vision was simple enough for all our stakeholders to understand. We could use it to question new initiatives and ideas and to show how the improvements in our camera app helped our users on the way to become the world’s best photographer.