Part of leading is communicating to your people where to go. To do that, leadership first has to agree on a destination. A strategic product vision is very valuable tool to align everyone on what this destination is, yet they very often end up as forgotten documents on a hard disk that were expensive to make.
In this case study I describe how to avoid this fate.
Springer Nature is a sprawling scientific publisher.
The result of multiple mergers — most notably of Springer Publishing and Nature Journals — it hosts around 4000 academic journals and tens of thousands of textbooks under various imprints.
The content is spread over multiple websites acquired over the years. This led to the following issues:
Late 2020 we in UX and Product leadership asked ourselves: where do we go from here?
How do we want to serve our research community in the future?
What do we want to be?
So a group of us worked with an agency to create a vision.
We saw the need for a vision internally at our Director levels; it wasn't imposed on us from higher up nor did it come from some remote innovation lab. We commissioned it. We selected the agency. We made the brief.
One of the reasons the UX and Product VPs asked me to be part of the vision team was because of my agency experience.
We knew why we wanted an agency to help:
We remained deeply involved, though. Working team members like me helped with the stakeholder interviews, debriefings, brainstorming of next step, blending with the agency, to be one unified team.
As the main day-to-day UXer working in the project team, I helped familiarize the agency team to the field, and the company, and the politics, bounced ideas, debated interpretations, made some and added to other visualizations, helped guide the storytelling, and often moderated discussions during our 3 meetings per week with the agency and the product leaders who commisioned this work.
The joint team did many stakeholder interviews inside the company with our passionate experts, from the CEO and the board to our internal leads.
Halfway the project team realized we needed more and better data. So we adjusted the project plan to add new, global, primary research with our users, and restarted ideation.
This research made it really easy to keep all the efforts focussed at al stages.
I once was challenged by some very entrenched powers in a large meeting that "I can't understand this vision, what even is it, can you even explain it in under a minute" and by starting with the three key user needs, I only needed 45 seconds.
I could then ask them what their plan was to satisfy these same needs in our future.
The final deck that explores the user needs, the options explored, the pros, the cons, the decision making, the example innovations, is 70 slides long. It is not frozen in time, though, we make new versions as we uncover new information. It is an essential part of keeping the momentum.
As one of the very few people who has worked on every part of it, I became one of the two main storytellers of this vision. We told it together when we could, but also individually. We had the various decks ready, we could rattle off the main points.
I have done this now so often I can tell describe this vision to experts in other departments in 5 minutes, or the whole thing for as long as an hour to people brand new to the field of scientific publishing.
The vision wasn't simply handed off to teams. Because we involved many leaders early, we all had a sense of ownership.
Top company leadership asked us for a flagship project so we could show everyone the direction we were going to. It had to be visible, inspiring, time-boxed, yet large enough that delivery teams would build real experience in how to get us to the future.
Doing this first project turned out to be pivotal. Once a chunk of the main website had been transformed, it became easy to see for everyone how to do the rest, and how the other properties would fit in.
Being Domain Lead UX for the teams working on the main content website, I was already aware of how the teams worked and what kind of project would be successful.
The pilot was to update the menu & footer on our central repository, link.springer.com, and to move one limited set of journals to a new unified brand look. It was received internally and externally with so much acclaim that we got the mandate to update all of link.springer.com.
This included the scholarly content of article, journal, and book pages, as well as explanatory content like front page and section pages, making the site ready for all other sites to be unified with it.
As a last contribution, I made a tentative schedule and roadmap of how all the other brand and content websites could be moved and merged over the years to create this unified vision. This train is now on track. I am comfortable to now step off and watch it roll along so I can go help solve the next big problem.
I did not describe the vision itself in this article, because it turned out that what was most important for buy-in was not the details themselves, but that they were convincing by nature of coming from strong user research, and that they were explained appropriately.
But in broad lines, the vision asked us all to organize all knowledge in one repository and all communication to scientists about how to be successful authors in one place around it, and then to...