The web is full of chatter as the world digests Facebook’s announcements at yesterday’s F8 developer conference of Timeline and OpenGraph.

Chris Cox's presentation at F8 is essential viewing for anyone in product management

The purpose of this post is not to summarise the developments or hypothesise on the implications: there are plenty of pundits doing that already. In this post we explore the importance of product vision to successful product development, and use Facebook’s Timeline as an exemplar of best practice.

What is product vision?

Every digital product should have a purpose: this answers the question “why would someone use the product”. Whereas the product purpose is the reason someone would use the product today, the product vision determines why someone would use the product at some period in the future. (Typically in digital up to five years in the future: few people are brave enough to make predictions about how the digital world will look more than five years from now.) The product vision is a long-term aspiration which guides product development decisions in the short-term.

Product vision isn’t talked about much in digital product development. That’s mostly because developing a suitable vision is particularly hard in such a fast-moving environment. Indeed, commitment to a vision can be a hindrance, preventing companies from adjusting rapidly to markets because of commitment to an unsuitable roadmap and vision. Much of our work at Keplar involves helping clients to adopt an iterative approach to product development that emphasizes learning from consumers and, as far as possible, co-creating digital products with consumers, so that the products develop around the actual needs and behaviours of real users. This more “bottom up” approach can sit uncomfortably with the more “top down”, vision-led approach.

The two approaches are not incompatible, however. The vision needs to be high-level enough that it gives product managers space to make short-term design and development decisions around user behaviours, but still move the product (and the userbase) in the direction of the vision.  Also the vision need not be static: it can evolve as you learn more about your userbase. At its core should be an aspiration that is recognisable to users, just as it needs to be recognisable to everyone involved in developing the product on both the design and development sides.

Characteristics of a good product vision

1. It is an aspiration: the vision needs to be a stretch – if it describes a product that already exists today, then it won’t prove any help in driving the product to new heights
2. It is inspiring: if people are going to overcome the myriad challenges associated with delivering a stretch target, then they have to really believe in the vision. The world should be a better place when the vision is realised
3. It is about the consumer, not the product or the company developing the product: it is easy to state the purpose of a product in terms of commercial benefit (it is nearly always more profit.) However that’s not something that users are going to buy into, and it’s a terrible guide to making short-term product development decisions because it is often hard to link these to long-term commercial gain. It is much harder to build a digital product around a commercial vision than build a business model around a product vision. That is why the product vision needs to be about the consumer, and not the company developing the product

The case for Facebook introducing Timeline: a complete overhaul of the profile page

Timeline is a significant evolution of the Facebook profile page, a core part of the Facebook experience since its inception.

Before we look at timeline in any kind of detail, however, it’s worth stepping back and examining the case for Facebook to significantly overhaul its profile page. The business case for doing so is very, very weak:

1. Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with a userbase of over 800M users. It is still growing rapidly, and it is hard to imagine that changing the profile page will drive significant incremental growth beyond its current growth rate
2. Facebook is only just starting to exploit the monetization opportunities around its existing services. It has developed into one of the biggest forces in display advertising (because of the large number of impressions and high eCPMs generated by banners on its site). At the same time it is developing an enormous database of its users and their relationship to a whole range of products and services, through the Like button; the possibilities to monetise this data are significant. So, there are plenty of short-term commercial opportunities that Facebook could concentrate on exploiting: it is not clear that overhauling the profile page would help it do so any faster
3. Overhauling the profile page is fraught with risk. Because it is a core part of the Facebook experience, any changes to it which jar with users are likely to lead to a massive outcry across the 800M userbase. Any change is going to take time for users to get used to, and in the interim their engagement levels may well decline. Fear of upsetting existing users is one reason why eBay’s user interface looks almost the same today as it did 5 years ago

Given the lack of commercial necessity and high risk associated with overhauling the profile page, few companies in Facebook’s position would take this step. But Facebook is no ordinary company.

The vision for Timeline

The vision for Timeline can be summarised:

The vision for Timeline meets all of the criteria for a great product vision. It is a huge stretch: whilst the current Facebook profile is probably one of the nicest profile pages on the web today, it is far from the “best place to define who I am”. The level of ambition drives each of the subgoals for the vision: the Timeline should encompass a user’s entire life, whilst also looking beautiful, being easy to populate and giving users the control they require. The vision is inspiring and if executed well will prove enormously exciting to Facebook users.

The impact of that vision

The resulting product is pretty spectacular:

And the competitive landscape has been transformed. Google Plus, which so recently looked like it was making significant headway in catching up with Facebook, now looks antiquated by comparison. Product vision may be all about the consumer, but the commercial impact of getting it right cannot be underestimated.