Are you an experienced Product Manager struggling to communicate your vision?
Do you have a plan for the upcoming years but nobody recognizes your innovative thinking?
I get you.
I’ve been in your shoes.
But I found a way out and upwards.
In this article, I’ll teach you how you can do the same.
I’ll show you, step by step, how you can create a Product Blueprint. This document deepens your strategic thinking while building your reputation as a thoughtful product leader.
How a Product Blueprint Will Propel Your Career
The Product Blueprint lets you achieve the following:
1. Show Your Thought Leadership
You might be an excellent strategic thinker, but your impact is limited if you don’t share your vision.
A Product Blueprint allows you to convey your ideas easily to everyone. This is important when trying to establish yourself as a Product Leader.
If you’re eyeing a promotion, a document like this will help you. Why? It shows you think long-term and consider the big picture, tying your plans to the company’s vision, mission, and strategy.
2. Think Deeply About Your Product
To write the document, you must reflect on a broad timeline.
Where did you start? Where did you end up? How well did you predict your trajectory?
Forcing you to reflect backward and look forward encourages short-term and long-term thinking. This benefits you as a leader and your product as a result.
3. Set an Example for Your Team
Once you create your Product Blueprint, share it with your team. Encourage them to create something similar focused on their scope of work.
Remember – you don’t need a title to start showing leadership traits.
A key difference between PMs and leaders is that the latter don’t just adopt best practices, they infuse them throughout the organization.
Not creating a Product Blueprint is missing out on an easy opportunity to show your innovative thinking.
So why don’t more PM’s create this?
Why Most PMs Fail to Demonstrate Leadership
Aspiring Product Leaders know they need to communicate the product’s vision.
But it’s easy to get it wrong. Most people fail for one of these reasons:
- They rely on a roadmap to display their product thinking
A roadmap tells you when to build what. A Product Blueprint answers why you’re building something. It conveys the bigger picture. Think of it as the context behind the roadmap. - They create a 1-pager with plans for the year
While this is useful for the current year, it doesn’t connect the dots in the long term. It fails to gather in one place how the vision, mission, and strategy connect to form a multi-year plan. - They expect their thinking to come out organically
People get different levels of information from conversations. Often, they forget most of what they heard anyway. Counting on your message to spread organically is a long shot and almost guaranteed to fail.
Think you don’t have time to spend on this? Think again.
I’ll show you how to create your Product Blueprint, step-by-step, faster than you think.
Once you have it ready, you’ll see how much time you save when evangelizing your team, their mission, and your strategy and tactics for the year.
How to Easily Show Your Product Vision Expertise
During my time at Google, I created a template of a Product Blueprint that I used over the years. It helped me establish myself as a leader and prove to my managers and teams that I was thinking deeply and widely about the product I was working on.
The good news is that it doesn’t need to be complicated.
You can write it in a simple way, using bullet points.
I will share the template with you at the end of the article. But, for now, let me walk you through its sections:
1. Introduction
Compose an executive summary, including the Vision, Strategy, and key milestones for the year.
I recommend you fill out the rest of the document first, then come back to this section.
2. Vision
Describe your vision. This should show your long-term goal for the product. What problems do you aim to solve?
This can be anything from a few bullet points to a few paragraphs.
3. Strategy
Strategy is how you plan to implement the product vision.
I recommend breaking it down by years, listing the milestones you envision for the next 4-5 years.
In Product, you’re always told to work towards outcomes, not outputs.
But you know, as well as I do, that it’s easier said than done.
A Product Blueprint gives you that opportunity. Your milestones should be outcomes, not outputs like you would put in a roadmap. Product Leaders think about outcomes – this is your chance to show you are a leader.
4. Risks & Mitigation
This demonstrates that you consider long-term risks that could disrupt your product development.
By identifying them, you become more aware and will counteract them when making decisions.
These risks can be of any nature. Compliance, competitor-related, technology limitations, or user adoption, are some examples.
5. Looking Back
Reflect on the past year. How did it begin? How will it end?
Include bullet points that paint a clear picture of the situation at the start and end of the year.
If it’s not your first year working on the document, compare your predictions to the facts. It’s a quick and effective reality check. It shows your progress or how far you’ve diverged from your plans.
6. Looking Forward
Think about the upcoming year and your goals for the next 12 months. What are your key tactics? What challenges do you anticipate? How will you measure success?
After completing your Product Blueprint, have it reviewed by your manager. Then, share it with anyone and everyone who shows interest.
It will foster team alignment while building your reputation as someone with sharp strategic thinking.
Final Thoughts
The real power of this document is in updating it year after year.
The first time is the lengthiest, but then all you need to do is update the “Looking Back” and “Looking Forward” sections.
You create value each time with a fraction of the work.
Ready to create your Product Blueprint? Click here and copy this template.
List some initial ideas. Then, get feedback from peers and your manager on whether filling it out would be useful. If the answer is yes – complete the document!
