Visions Become Reality through Structure

It’s always a treat to sit in meetings where fanciful ideas become concrete product visions.

The room is full of energy and élan. Ideas are bouncing across the table. Features are multiplying. Someone has already opened Figma.

Someone else has said, “What if we add AI?”

And, for one beautiful moment, absolutely everything seems possible.

Then someone asks that question.

That hated question.

The one where you can almost hear the air seeping out of the huge balloon of hope:

Where do we start?

Silence.

A shrug here. A thoughtful frown there. Everyone waiting—and quietly hoping someone else will answer.

But that question doesn’t have to kill the vision.

Visions become reality through structure.

So the first question is not: Where do we start?

It is: What is the goal?

Because “we want an app” is not a goal.

“We want an AI assistant” is not a goal.

“We need a new platform” is definitely not a goal—although it may already have a name, a logo and three enthusiastic stakeholders.

The goal is what the solution is supposed to change.

Perhaps the app is meant to stop customers abandoning a complicated on-boarding process.

Perhaps the AI assistant is meant to relieve a support team that answers the same twelve questions every day.

Perhaps the shiny new platform is supposed to prevent employees from spending half their working lives searching for the latest version of a document called:

THIS-IS-DEFINITELY-THE-ONE-unless-Jürgen-comments-again.pdf

... which takes 48 minutes to fill out and needs to be done every month ... again ...

Now we are getting somewhere!

Because the goal changes the starting point.

The app might not require an app at all. The AI assistant might begin with discovering whether those twelve questions have twelve agreed answers.

And the platform?

That may begin with working out which of the seventeen “final” versions is actually final.

Focusing on the goal doesn’t make the vision smaller.

It keeps the energy alive while giving it somewhere useful to go.

It separates the exciting ideas from the necessary ones, gives the discussion a structure from which clear next steps follow easily!  

So start with:

What are we really trying to make happen? In order to really make it happen. 

Once we know that, we can ask the next question:

How will we know when we’ve achieved it?

But that is a story for another meeting …