Sarcastic T-Shirts & Product Vision

At the fall of 2021 I joined an Israeli Start-Up (SU) named Ottopia. The company develops a Teleoperation E2E solution for the Autonomous Vehicle market. As my first day there neared I knew that my (soon to be) boss will not be in the office that day, so I reflected on which one of ~40 sarcastic / politically incorrect T-Shirts will make a memorable first impression.

People who know me are not surprised by this act` people who don’t, on the other hand,…I finally chose this one, as it was the most appropriate one for the occasion:

The amusement and laughter on Ottopia’s employees faces were worth the trouble, and proved my decision right 😁

Luckily for me Ottopia’s CEO was one of the people who loved this choice. Why ‘Luckily’? Because it pointed to his state of mind regarding free, creative, out-of-the-box thinking of his employees - self-party included.

Once my new Boss (VP Product) heard of it, she was very amused by it too. So I had two of the most important people in the company, from my PoV, on my side in this aspect.

One of the main & major tasks I initiated and took upon myself was creating the Product-Vision, as it was just the time the product reached its scaling point - both from the multi-users (operators & vehicles) perspective and from the customers & prospects funnel needed handling.

In order to create a long-term vision I conducted in several activities:

• Customer / Prospect interviews — collecting feedback and valuable information regarding missing features and capabilities of the current E2E developed solution and other, surrounding / complimentary issues they might face in the future

• Internal brainstorming — both in the executive level and in lower-level employees from all orgs in the company — CTO’s office, CBO’s office, R&D, Tech Support, Operations, UX/UI out-source office; we did not always agree on things, but there was always an open, emotional, and - in most cases - productive discussion

• Market research looking into the future and recognizing what might be futuristic market complimentary trends and needed services.

• Coming to the office each day with a different sarcastic / politically incorrect T-Shirt — generating various comments from my colleagues, some of these comments spurred new ideas and new thought-leads in my mind, which enabled my creative thought process to advance. At one point I even declared myself as “Head of Motivation” while wearing the following T-Shirt just to get a conversation running
  

It took my about 3 months, of repeating the above mentioned steps, to come up with not only a long-term vision which included 2 additional complimentary products that company would be able to offer, on top of its current one, but I also had enough input to set the operational and Roles & Responsibilities of each product, the interaction between them, and first-level operator’ users’ journey as well as the blueprint for the next-levels users user-journey.

I named the vision — Tele-Vision, as I used the Customer-Value-Chain (CVC) Decoupling strategy for it, creating the business model option - for the company’s customers - to select any subset of these three products, including the entire package, thus introducing barriers for current / future competitors to enter the overall market.

My point here is simple: find what makes your creative thought process tick, and use that to its fullest — you’ll most probably get new ideas that will astonish even you.

So don’t be afraid or hesitant to put yourself out there, and make sure your boss(es) are willing to let you fly high, trusting you’ll keep yourself in check, and not too far off.