Provide Direction Despite Uncertainty: Workshops for Creating a Compelling Product Vision

Context: The software-intensive business is characterized by increasing market dynamics, rapid technological changes, and fast-changing customer behaviors. Organizations face the challenge of moving away from traditional roadmap formats to an outcome-oriented approach that focuses on delivering value to the customer and the business. An important starting point and a prerequisite for creating such outcome-oriented roadmaps is the development of a product vision to which internal and external stakeholders can be aligned. However, the process of creating a product vision is little researched and understood. Objective: The goal of this paper is to identify lessons-learned from product vision workshops, which were conducted to develop outcome-oriented product roadmaps. Method: We conducted a multiple-case study consisting of two different product vision workshops in two different corporate contexts. Results: Our results show that conducting product vision workshops helps to create a common understanding among all stakeholders about the future direction of the products. In addition, we identified key organizational aspects that contribute to the success of product vision workshops, including the participation of employees from functionally different departments.