Example data. Fieldnote is a fictional company used to fill all 61 boards, so the examples tell one consistent story.
Post-PMF Fieldnote, 2 squads and a new head of sales. Élise, Karim, Tom, Ana and Nadia put the vision on one board.
What the team took away
"Nobody retypes anything" became the sentence Nadia uses in every demo, and the reason the Integrations squad exists.
How to run it
Preparation
Leadership plus the product and design leads, six to eight people. Everyone who will be asked 'why are we doing this' by their team.
Ask each participant to write their vision sentence alone beforehand and send it to you. Paste them anonymously on the board.
Prepare the four bottom blocks with what exists today: current target group, current product line, this year's business goals.
Have the company mission and last strategy deck at hand; the vision must fit under them, not replace them.
Agenda
15 min
Read the anonymous visions Read the sentences aloud. Ask the group to mark words that appear in more than three of them and words that appear only once. Both lists matter.
25 min
Target group and needs Who is the product for in three years? Write the group, then their top 3 needs. Anything that is a need of the company rather than the customer moves to Business goals.
20 min
Product Three to five defining characteristics of the future product. Not features: what makes it different, what it refuses to be.
15 min
Business goals What the company gets: revenue, market position, strategic option. Each with a horizon and a rough magnitude.
30 min
Write the vision Now the top block. In pairs, one sentence, no jargon, that a new hire repeats after hearing it once. Vote, then the leader chooses between the top two and says why.
15 min
Read-back test Pick two people who were not in the pairs that wrote the winner. They explain the vision to the room in their own words. If they cannot, edit.
Pitfalls
Writing the vision sentence first produces a slogan. Do the four bottom blocks first, the sentence writes itself from them.
A vision that mentions a technology or a feature expires in 18 months. Keep it about the change in the customer's life.
Voting to consensus gives you a sentence nobody hates and nobody remembers. Let the leader make the final call, in the room.
Afterwards
The vision opens the roadmap, the OKR session and every onboarding. Business goals feed the North Star Metric work; the Product block becomes the filter for Now / Next / Later.