The importance of defining your vision before you define your mission, or start working on small deliveries
Knowing why you are building what you are building, and where you want to go, is really important.
Introduction
Initiatives is a tool for clarifying the direction. By going through the process of creating initiatives with projects, features, and objectives, and mapping them out in a timeline it makes the mission more practical and how to build towards it more clear.
This timeline combined with the priority sets a clear path of execution for the near future, right in front of you, and ideally a bit out of reach. Anyone in your company can look at the product initiatives to quickly understand what the most important streams of work are, why they matter, and how they are progressing.
This also simplifies the timelining and prioritization greatly, as projects and features become too low level to effectively do prioritization across a whole organization. By grouping it this way, we are able to effectively prioritize a few initiatives instead of tens of projects.
Components of an initaitive
Projects and Programs
Primarily a way to effectively allocate resources: humans and capital.
Read more about projects and programs
Objectives and milestones
A strategy alignment mechanism that demands directional focus
Read more about objectives and milestones
Features
A group of tasks that provide a functional capability to create customer-facing value, to be completed by a product team, within 1-2 sprints.