The Nirvana Vision / Relentless Mission Framework
Vision = the customer's Nirvana state, with your company deleted from it. Mission = how you'll get them there.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 95%
Williams' two-statement framework for a vision and mission that survive contact with reality. The vision describes the Nirvana state you aim to enable for users and customers in five to ten years — bound to your target market, prefixable with 'in the future...', and containing no mention of your company, product or solution. The mission is what you will relentlessly iterate on to move incrementally toward that state: what you will do and how, encoding your unique differentiating advantage. Because it is agnostic of the company, it can be applied at every level — company, group, team, individual.
Origin
Ben Williams' own framework, developed and used at Snyk (and applied to Snyk's Developer Growth Group).
Core principles
- 01A vision your competitors could also achieve is a real vision — the market's better future, not your roadmap.
- 02Naming your product in the vision collapses it into a solution statement.
- 03The mission is the how — and must encode your unfair advantage.
- 04Bound the vision to your target market: not too wide, not too narrow.
- 05The framework is fractal: it works at company, group, team and individual level.
How to run it
- 1
Write the Nirvana-state vision
Describe the state you aim to enable for your users and customers in five to ten years — the imagined better future. Test it by prefixing 'in the future...'.
Pro tip A good vision could equally be realized by a competitor if you fail to execute effectively, efficiently or quickly enough. That is the point, not a bug.
Watch out It must not mention your company, your product, or anything solution-related at all — it should be completely agnostic of those things.
- 2
Bind it to the target market
Scope the vision to who you serve: not too wide, not too narrow. Snyk's growth-group vision is bound to developers, not to 'everyone'.
- 3
Write the mission as your fundamental approach
The mission is the thing you relentlessly iterate on to move incrementally closer to the Nirvana state. It answers how you will realize the vision by describing what you will do and how you will do it.
- 4
Encode the differentiating advantage in the mission
The mission should ideally encode any unique differentiating advantage you have — for Snyk at large, its unequalled security intelligence and knowledge of application context.
Pro tip If the mission would read identically for a competitor, the advantage is missing.
- 5
Cascade the framework down the org
Apply it at every level from company down to the individual, so each level's vision/mission trickles down from the one above.
Pro tip Expect it to be slow: the process is not easy and requires real time, but the bounds it imposes produce well-crafted statements that stand the test of time.
In the wild
Williams applied the framework one level below the company, at the growth group. The vision names no product and describes only the developer's future state; the mission names Snyk and states the approach and the differentiator (frictionless self-serve).
→ Vision: 'every developer securely unleashes their creativity.' Mission: 'to connect every developer and their organizations to the value of the Snyk platform with frictionless self-serve adoption and expansion.'
Common mistakes
Putting your product in the vision
The vision must be solution-agnostic. Once it names your product, it stops being an imagined better future for the market and becomes a marketing line that expires with the roadmap.
A mission with no differentiator
If the mission doesn't encode a unique advantage, it describes an approach anyone could take, and gives teams no basis for choosing between paths.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product, growth and functional leaders who need a vision/mission for their group that ladders to the company's and does not read as a slogan.
Not ideal for
Teams needing near-term operating goals — this framework sets a five-to-ten-year horizon, not this quarter's targets.
From the transcript
“the vision is the Nirvana state that you aim to enable for your users and customers in five to ten years”
“critically it should not mention your company your product or anything solution related at all completely agnostic of those things”
“every developer securely unleashes their creativity and the mission is to connect every developer and their organizations to the value of the sneak platform with…”
From the episode
How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut
Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk)