Do you have a vision?

If your business is in any way supported by IT, vision is an invaluable tool for you to succeed with implementation any enterprise-level project, be it a major enterprise transformation undertaking or deployment of new version of operating system on office computers.

Cheshire Cat

Whatever you do, there will always be a question: “What’s next?” If you can not answer this question, then how you can be sure that what you are doing is for good? That it advances you towards the goal?

Do you remember this dialog between Alice and Cheshire Cat?

`Cheshire Puss,‘ [Alice] began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. `Come, it’s pleased so far,’ thought Alice, and she went on. `Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?‘
`That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat.
`I don’t much care where–’ said Alice.
`Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.
`–so long as I get SOMEWHERE,’ Alice added as an explanation.
`Oh, you’re sure to do that,’ said the Cat, `if you only walk long enough.’

The same thing with products and projects: if you do not care, what you build, then it, of course, does not matter how you do that. But when you know what is your goal, you can then build strategies, roadmaps and plans to answer the question of “how”.

The product roadmap should describe the path from where you are now, to realizing the vision you have spelled out in your product strategy. You do have a product strategy, right? If not, your product roadmap has no real context, and that’s a serious problem.

Marty Cagan in Product Roadmaps

Vision enables you to talk about the future and create it in the end of the day.

Vision ties your team together and enables individual contributors to achieve and overachieve.

Vision builds trust between you and your partners and allows you to focus on what you do best.