The vision house is a framework used to communicate your vision and how it connects to your goals. I’ve been using it for years and decided to tweak a few things to make a holistic view into your vision, org, and OKRs. Building a vision house is a must have for product teams, and like many product management frameworks, it can also be used outside of building software!
In my experience, misalignment with partners (like engineering) is often the result of people that don’t know the vision and how it connects to their everyday work. I built this vision house for that very reason. I needed a way to connect the vision of the team to our OKRs. It’s also a great way to connect Product Manager or “Squad goals” to leader goals. I believe in establishing OKRs at the Product Manager level, and then adopting those OKRs all the way up the chain. This keeps leaders connected to the outcomes of their team.
A vision house is a powerful framework to strategically organize the “who” and the “what” to the “why” and the “how” in an easy to understand way.
Some variations on the Vision House include: inserting goals or strategies in-between the mission and leader (use this if you want to show your team laddering up to org-level strategies or org-level goals).
Enjoy!
2 comments
this is great, luke! I’ve recently found (through some of the goals i’ve set for myself this year) that aligning vision with everyday tasks is crucial to being able to track and ultimately achieve goals. It’s fascinating how this framework can apply not just in software but across various fields. how have you seen outcomes change after having applied this framework?
I agree, it can be applied outside of software development and can help any team better align with stakeholders. The biggest impact to outcomes I’ve seen is related to leadership alignment. This leader alignment helps teams move faster and makes it less likely for them to get bogged down with conversations about “why” something is being prioritized.