Project Vision

Introduction

Product Vision for Cloud Native Platform

  • Describes the purpose of the Product
  • Provides a common understanding of the direction to move towards
  • Guides and informs decisions regarding the platform

Helps to answer the following questions:

  • Who is the target audience, the benefits it provides, the key features and the business goals for the organization
  • This guides us in the direction of where we want to be, not necessarily what is available today

Anatomy of a product vision board

Vision

5 main sections:

  • Target Group (the group most likely to benefit from using the product)
  • Needs (provided benefits, why would someone want to use the product)
  • Product (key features of the product)
  • Business Goals (benefits to the organization)
  • Vision (the goal we want to achieve)

Target Group

  • Encompasses both IT and non-IT users
  • Encompasses the range of solution types (large-scale apps to smaller pieces of a much larger app)

Needs

  • Enable solution builders to have more autonomy over their solutions and enforce the self-serve model
  • Challenges from previous projects included the lack of consistency in infrastructure
  • Environment were slightly different
  • Usually required someone to manually intervene to make adjustments
  • Broad knowledge of the differences was not widely known
  • Bundling the documentation with the solution ensures this vital information is not decoupled

Product

  • Security features on the platform that solutions can benefit from
  • CNCF: well supported community of open source projects
  • Observability: enables a better understanding as to why something went wrong

Business Goals

  • Rather than pay for infrastructure that may sit dormant, it can be targeted when needed
  • Fail fast: solutions could be deployed on Day 0 which enables early realization of success or failure, allowing teams to pivot in the right direction
  • Aligns with the GoC Digital Standards and break the silos within IT (dev and operations)

Vision

  • Highlights the key ideas: reliable, self-service, rapid deployment

Roadmap