Setting a Vision for Cyber PMMs

"Be stubborn on vision, flexible on details." – Jeff Bezos, CEO and Founder of Amazon.

A clear vision is essential to knowing where we're going. A lack of vision leads to chaos and directionless-ness. For Cyber PMMs, we are all too familiar with working on assignments that seem unrelated to a broader vision. Build this, write that, publish this, draft that. Day after day after day. When activities aren't connected to a vision, we get stuck in "activity without accomplishment."

Before doing anything, we should first ask, "what's the end goal here?" Then we can reverse engineer a path from there. This is why I like the Bezos quote, because a vision really shouldn't change often. Probably the best example of this is the goal to land on the moon in the 1960's — the "moonshot." Everyone knew the goal. There was no confusion. It didn't change to "let's land on Saturn". And that vision kept people together. In the product world, it's akin to building a wireframe for a product or website in Figma, before investing tons of resources into coding. Or having a recipe before cooking. Or having a manual to assemble something.