5. Understanding the Role of Vision and Strategy in Product Leadership

Vision and strategy play a crucial role in managing expectations within product teams and across an organization. One of the most frequent questions I get when discussing time allocation for product leaders is: "Why do you need to spend so much time—50% or more—on managing expectations?" The answer often lies in how well-defined the vision and strategy are. Without clarity in these areas, expectation management becomes a time-consuming challenge.

The Importance of Vision and Strategy

To illustrate this point, I’ll share my experience with Lopes, where I played a key role in shaping the vision and strategy for the company's digital transformation. At Lopes, we articulated our vision as helping people find the right place by connecting them to the right property through the best broker. This concept, which we called the tri-match—the ideal connection between customer, property, and broker—was central to everything we built.

This vision wasn’t just a one-off exercise. It had to be shared and refined across the organization to ensure alignment. Over the first few weeks, after completing my onboarding, I created a visual representation of this vision and shared it with everyone across the company. I gathered feedback, adjusted the details, and refined it until the team had a shared understanding of what we were working toward.

Setting Strategic Objectives

Once the vision was clear, the next step was defining strategic objectives for the upcoming year. At Lopes, we outlined four main goals for 2021:

Increase digital sales: In 2020, 20% of total sales came from digital channels. Our goal was to raise this to 50%.
Grow the secondary market: We aimed to increase sales of ready-to-move-in homes while maintaining the volume of new real estate developments (off-plan sales).
Leverage digital for non-digital leads: This involved using our digital platforms to enhance leads that originated offline, such as from signage or direct visits to sales stands.
From lead to sale: We wanted to explore cross-sell opportunities between primary and secondary markets, and to help clients with related needs, such as financing.

These strategic objectives were defined collaboratively—first with my product team and then with the entire leadership of Lopes Labs. We aligned everything with the tri-match concept, ensuring the strategy supported our overarching vision.

Continuous Communication

Having a clear vision and strategy is just the starting point. It’s not enough to define them once and never revisit them. Continuous communication of these elements is essential for effective expectation management. Every opportunity I had, I reiterated the vision and strategy, especially when new requests or priorities emerged from other departments.

For example, if a commercial or operations leader approached me with a feature request, I would respond by asking how the request aligned with our agreed-upon vision and strategic objectives. This approach ensured that decisions were aligned with our larger goals and provided a framework for saying "no" to requests that didn't fit.

At Lopes, we had biweekly meetings: one with the entire product development team at Lopes Labs and another with the entire company. During these meetings, we would revisit our purpose, our product vision, and our strategic objectives, ensuring everyone stayed aligned. This repetition was key not only for reinforcing the company's direction but also for introducing new team members to the overall strategy.

Vision and Strategy as Tools for Managing Expectations

By frequently communicating the vision and strategy, I was able to use them as tools to manage expectations across the organization. If someone requested a feature that didn’t fit into our strategic framework, I could refer back to our goals and make decisions based on alignment with the overall direction. This clarity helped reduce misunderstandings and fostered a shared understanding of priorities.

In the next steps of this process, we’ll dive deeper into how to build a vision and strategy, breaking down the steps required to ensure they are clear, well-communicated, and actionable.

Conclusion

In product leadership, vision and strategy are not just high-level concepts—they are vital tools for managing expectations and ensuring alignment across teams. By continuously communicating these elements, product leaders can focus their efforts on delivering business results that align with the company’s goals. Without a clear vision and strategy, managing expectations can become overwhelming, leading to inefficiencies and misaligned priorities. Therefore, vision and strategy must be at the forefront of a product leader’s role, ensuring that all team efforts are directed toward achieving the company's long-term objectives.