You can’t lead if you don’t know where you’re going

Design and commnicate your North Star Vision

Hi all! Here’s your weekly fix of ‘Designing Leadership.’ Hope you enjoy the read and feel free to forward this along to friends.

Picture this for a minute — your teams are running full speed ahead with experiments to gather learnings that will, hopefully, eventually turn into an external launch. Projects are hitting the right milestones, and everyone seems pretty darn content with all the great progress the teams are making.

Sounds like a rosy picture, right? For the most part, yes. Except for one small issue.

Nobody really knows what these experiments and projects are supposed to amount to. If successful with each and every milestone, what will the end result be? A successful product that provides user value, sure. A product that sells like hotcakes, absolutely! But what’s the compelling story you’ll tell that will make your users/customers stop in their tracks and cry tears of joy when using your product? This is where a North Star vision comes in. It’s a powerful tool, let me tell you why.

What is a North Star vision?

An idea or concept that brings clarity to what’s ahead communicated through an artifact (or a series of artifacts) that is easy to digest and memorable. This artifact can be an illustrated user journey map, storyboard, motion reel, or an ad selling the vision for that future product. Not convinced you need one? Here’s why you’ll want to invest your and your team’s time creating one.

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A successful North Start vision…

Inspires people to think big

It’s easy to get caught up in all the granular details of projects you’re trying to move along day in and day out and the data you’re tracking to see which project is a good candidate for launch. If you’re lucky, the entire org will come together on a quarterly or bi-annual basis to share some of the big plans for the product and the company as a whole. What’s often missing is that regular pulse check on “what all of these projects are going to add up to.” A North Star vision can help the team step away from the day-to-day microscopic progress and help them think bigger and ultimately take more risks to get to that vision. Ideally, it’s aspirational in nature and inspires your team to stretch to achieve more. And which leader doesn’t want to inspire their team?!

Brings people together

If you choose to bring your team together to craft a North Start vision, make sure you give them plenty of space and time to discuss and debate the details. This exercise will help ensure that your team gets more and more aligned with every iteration and can confidently rally behind the final version. On the flip side, even if certain team members are not participants in crafting the vision, you can still bring them along for the ride by sharing progress. Eventually, when you’re ready to share the vision with your team, it will act as a great tool to bring them together and align around a solid plan for the future.

Is memorable

A great North Star vision is so striking in its presentation that it’s difficult for people to simply chuck it out of their minds. It’s exciting, inspiring, and hopeful, engrained in people’s minds as a natural progression from where you are today to something incredible tomorrow. Something that hasn’t been realized yet.

Sheds light on key moments of a user journey

There’s a clear narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. It answers questions like ‘how would the target user get from point A to point B?’ ‘Which problems would this set of features solve for the user?’ ‘What would get in their way as they try to accomplish their tasks or goals?’ This narrative will help anyone who comes across this vision understand some of the critical make or break points in a user’s journey.

Evolves over time

As your users’ needs and the needs of the business change over time, so does the vision artifact. Ideally, you’d stick to a vision long enough to make parts of it a reality, but this isn’t always the case. Keep an open mind going into the process. You may need to continue to evolve your vision artifact as you react to changes in the industry and business.

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A few examples of teams that have created successful artifacts to represent their vision:

🔗 Airbnb

This particular video is more of a feature release video but I wanted to include it here because it’s relevant to everything I’ve said above. This video paints a pretty good picture of what some of the pain points Airbnb is solving for with their new releases and how they’re bringing these solutions to life for their users.

🔗 Apple’s 1987 vision for the future

This video is from 1987. It‘s a vision for the future, purely hypothetical when it was created but completely realistic today. This is exactly how you want your vision to be. You can pick the time horizon you’re going for — looking 6 months ahead or way beyond that (this particular one goes way into the future). The idea is to make it aspirational, which this one definitely does. A must-watch!

🔗 Using a storyboard to tell your story

I’m including this piece by Kyle Murphy that talks about how he and his team went about creating their North Star vision in a storyboard format. If creating a video feels too much of a heavy lift, consider the storyboarding approach. A big benefit of this approach is that it’s much easier to evolve and tweak a storyboard than a video.

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Investing your and your team’s time and energy in creating a North Star vision can be critical in getting aligned and pumped about what’s ahead. It’s a great tool to get everyone out of the day-to-day mindset and look forward to aspirations that seem difficult to achieve. The challenge of such a vision is what usually motivates teams to get behind a shared vision and march on toward massive achievements.

Three things that caught my eye this week:

👉 What’s next for Dev Mode

💻 Relume — websites designed and built faster with AI

😍 This gorgeous typeface — Pangaia

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Until next time! 👋