Having a longer term view will help to give your team focus and ensure that you can formulate a strategy and themes to work on that will result in meaningful products being delivered to your customers and / or users. It also means that you don’t have to completely rethink what you’re working on every quarter, which means less disruption to good team work!

In every workshop you will find participants who will be hesitant to take part unless they are told why they are there, what you will be doing and what the end result will be (and rightly so!). With this in mind, it’s beneficial to start any workshop with the ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ to save time and head off these sorts of questions:

• What: Working together to define a team vision.
• Why: To have an agreed understanding of what our longer term aim is as a team.
• How: A one hour workshop.

Depending on the size of your business, you may already have a company vision and a relevant high level OKR or strategic goal that relates to your team. It’s worth spending 5 minutes reviewing these, if you have them. If you don’t then you can skip to the next step.

Write answers, one per Post-It and then discuss and group similar ideas together.

• By working with us, our partners / customers will improve…?
• By choosing our product, our users will have the ability to…?

This is all about getting your team to think about the impact that your work will have on your customers’ / users’ lives in 12 months’ time.

Remind your team that this isn’t about which features you deliver or what services you build, but something much more on a human level — how will their lives have changed? What will they be able to do that maybe they can’t do now?

• If we achieve the above, what will our customers / users be feeling?

This question is to get people thinking about the emotions that your customers or users will be feeling 12 months from now, if you’re successful in achieving the above. Will they be happy, stress-free or satisfied? Try to get your team to put themselves in your customers’ or users’ mindset.

Hopefully some themes have emerged from answering the questions in the last step and you should be able to have a time-boxed discussion about how to formulate your team vision statement:

You should end up with something that looks like this:

By <month, year>, our <customers / users> will be able to…