Guidelines on Developing Product Vision/Goal
There is much agile and Scrum literature that discusses product vision/goal setting as part of an envisioning process before sprints begin. The Scrum Guide on p. 14 "Monitoring Progress Toward a Goal", I think, describes what could be a product vision or goal (different from the Sprint Goal described elsewhere in this guide) as it is a goal across multiple sprints. Is there any more detail from scrum.org on who develops this goal, who is accountable for this goal, examples, guidelines, etc?
About the accountability of the product goals and vision, I think this must be the Product Owner, because he is responsible for what to do. If there are several products in a program it’s often best to have one overall responsible Product Owner. The Scrum Guide says “the Scrum Team crafts a Sprint Goal”, so crafting product goals and vision includes users and other stakeholders engagement.
Today I actually found an interesting blog on how to write a good vision statement on https://www.executestrategy.net/blog/write-good-vision-statement/
Actually there is one vote for making the product vision part of Scrum in the Scrum Guides Suggestion Forum.
There is probably more detail in the Scrum at Scale framework, but this is comparatively new and short on resources at the moment. The Scrum framework itself is largely agnostic about how a product vision ought to be formulated.
General advice would be to phrase a product vision in terms of empirically testable business propositions. These could be aligned towards the verification of a Minimum Viable Product. Product Owners should always be accountable for goals of this nature, as only they can make decisions regarding product value.
Alexander, thanks. The link is interesting and I am pretty familiar with corporate strategic planning. This would have to be adopted for a product vision statement, but there are lots of good points in the article that are similar to what I seen documented elsewhere for product vision.
Thanks, Ian. I will check out Scrum at Scale for further research. Making the Product Owner accountable agrees with what I have been reading elsewhere and your advice on making the vision "empirically testable" I think would tie with with the Product Owner defining acceptance criteria for each sprint (not described in Scrum Guide, but described in many other sources).
in my opinion, a vision is different with a goal/objective. The vision should be provided by the project sponsor and other key stakeholders. The goals should come with metrics, which can be contributed by product owners and other stakeholders.