HKSM

The Company Vision states the enterprise’s long-term purpose and strategic direction. In SBOK, it is an upstream input that guides the Project Vision Statement and steers backlog prioritization, releases, and sprint goals toward strategic outcomes.

Key Points

• High-level, long-term statement from executives that expresses why the company exists and where it is heading.
• Primary input to Create Project Vision and a guardrail for Product Owner prioritization.
• Used to align epics, user stories, and releases with strategic themes and value drivers.
• Relatively stable, but may be updated through portfolio or executive governance when strategy changes.
• Helps resolve conflicting stakeholder requests by providing a decision filter.
• Improves ROI by focusing delivery on outcomes that advance the company’s direction.

Purpose

The Company Vision ensures Scrum initiatives support the organization’s strategy, brand promise, and market positioning. It prevents local optimization by giving a unified direction for all products and projects.

By linking work to long-term goals, it clarifies what value looks like, which customers matter most, and what constraints or principles are non-negotiable.

Key Terms & Clauses

• Vision Statement: A concise description of the desired future state and impact the company aims to create.
• Strategic Themes: Focus areas (for example, growth, customer trust, operational excellence) that guide epics and releases.
• Value Proposition: The core promise to customers that backlog items should reinforce.
• Non-Negotiables: Guardrails such as ethics, compliance, security, or sustainability that cannot be traded off.
• Target Segment: Priority customer or market segments the company intends to serve.
• Success Signals: High-level indicators (market share, NPS, cost-to-serve) suggesting movement toward the vision.

How to Develop/Evaluate

1. Gather Direction: Review executive strategy, market analysis, brand guidelines, and regulatory constraints.
2. Draft the Statement: Create a brief, inspirational, and testable vision that names the intended impact and target customers.
3. Add Themes and Guardrails: Identify strategic themes, value drivers, and non-negotiables that will shape epics and policies.
4. Validate with Stakeholders: Confirm with sponsors, key customers, and internal leaders for clarity and feasibility.
5. Publish and Cascade: Communicate through the sponsor and Product Owner into the Project Vision Statement and product artifacts.

• Evaluation Criteria: Clear and memorable; aligned with strategy; stable yet adaptable; actionable through themes; measurable via leading indicators.
• Anti-Patterns: Generic slogans, conflicting priorities, or statements too broad to guide trade-offs.

How to Use

• Create Project Vision: Use the Company Vision as a core input to craft the Project Vision Statement with the sponsor and Product Owner.
• Develop Epics: Shape epics around strategic themes and value propositions drawn from the Company Vision.
• Create Prioritized Product Backlog: Apply the vision as a decision filter for ordering items; deprioritize or remove misaligned requests.
• Release Planning: Select releases that deliver outcomes moving the product toward strategic themes and success signals.
• Sprint Planning and Goals: Formulate sprint goals that ladder up to the product and company direction, avoiding misaligned scope.
• Review and Inspect: In Sprint Reviews, connect increments to the vision to demonstrate progress toward strategic outcomes.

Example Snippet

Company Vision: "Empower people and organizations to achieve more through simple, secure, and accessible digital experiences that build long-term trust."

• Strategic Themes: Customer trust, accessibility, operational efficiency.
• Non-Negotiables: Data privacy, regulatory compliance, inclusive design.
• Success Signals: Increased retention, reduced support volume, improved accessibility scores.

Risks & Tips

• Risk: Teams drift into feature-chasing; Tip: Trace epics and sprint goals to strategic themes.
• Risk: Conflicting stakeholder demands; Tip: Use the vision to justify trade-offs and backlog ordering.
• Risk: Vision is vague; Tip: Add measurable success signals and explicit non-negotiables.
• Risk: Strategy changes without communication; Tip: Update artifacts after governance decisions and brief the Scrum Team.
• Risk: Overreach within a sprint; Tip: Keep sprint goals small but clearly connected to the larger direction.

PMP/SCRUM Example Question

A senior stakeholder requests a feature that could boost short-term sales but undermines the company’s stated focus on customer trust. As Product Owner, what should you do?

1. Add the feature at the top of the product backlog to capture quick wins.
2. Reject the request or lower its priority, citing misalignment with the Company Vision and non-negotiables, and discuss alternatives.
3. Start a spike in the next sprint to gather technical feasibility data.
4. Ask the Scrum Master to override the governance since the stakeholder is influential.

Correct Answer: B — Reject the request or lower its priority due to misalignment with the Company Vision, and explore alternatives that support trust.

Explanation: The Company Vision is an input to backlog prioritization. The Product Owner should align ordering decisions with strategic themes and non-negotiables rather than chasing short-term gains.