Strategy & vision - a playbook of methods for envisioning and communicating goals and objectives
a method for envisioning your strategy
Updated on Thursday, March 22, 2020
Future State Vision is a strategy envisioning method that helps individuals and teams describe a concrete, measurable vision of the future, so you agree on what you’re building and why.
This page explains how the method works, the concrete outcomes the method generates, and the materials you need to try it out along with templates and framing material you can download and use as-is or customize.
future-state-vision.pptx (88.27 kB). Last modified 12/01/19
future-state-vision.pptx (88.27 kB). Last modified 12/01/19
Picture this. You and your team have just started a new project. You even know what you will build first, but how do you make sure what you build will lay the right foundation for where you want the product to go?
This list of things people do when the product is a success represents a concrete vision of the future, and each of these future behaviors can translate directly into epics, features, and backlog items for your team to work on.
Because Future State Vision aligns teams around a crystallized product vision, it is a highly versatile method ideal for project kickoffs for any kind of project.
Although most useful during opportunity definition, you can use Future State Vision at any stage of the design and development process to bring a misaligned teams back together.
It’s a core method for helping teams build better products and experiences.
Because you begin with brainstorms about what to change and what to keep, you will find Future State Vision especially useful for redesigns and relaunches where you have an existing system and expect to make significant changes.
Future State Vision results in a list of specific things users do. In contrast, you may want to envision a future that is more or less specific.
To imagine a future that is less specific, try a more generalized method for envisioning the future state:
To make the future vision more specific, create a customer journey map of the ideal future. You can convert the customer journey map into a user story map and identify your minimum viable/lovable product (MVP/MLP), so you can populate your backlog.
Austin Govella provides detailed instructions and facilitation tips for Future State Vision in his book, Collaborative Product Design.
Austin Govella derived Future State Vision from a systems thinking approach to innovation called Idealized Design formalized by Russel Ackoff.
Ackoff observed idealized design in action at Bell Labs in the 1950s. You can read or listen to the story on the Wharton School of Business’s blog, Knowledge@Wharton: How Bell Labs Imagined — and Created — the Telephone System of the Future.
Russel Ackoff, Jason Magidson, and Herbert Addison dive deeply into Idealized Design in the book of the same name.