Evangelizing the Vision

A few years back I opened a new office in Chicago for a global agricultural company, and my job was to fill it with a product and engineering team. There was one problem I hadn't planned for. The people I was trying to hire had no idea who the company was. None. I'd sit down across from a great engineer, say the name, and watch it land like a company I'd invented that morning.

So the name couldn't be the pitch. The mission had to be. The company existed to help farmers grow more food on less land, safely and sustainably, and behind that sat a bigger story. The planet's population keeps growing, and our current food production won't feed the number of people who'll be here by 2050.

Feeding the world. It's the story every ag company tells, and I could tell it and mean it, because I grew up in a small Illinois farm town and spent my summers and weekends working on a pig farm. The math of that place stuck with me. The more efficient our operation got, the more people we could feed for less.

So when I sat across from a candidate who'd never heard of my employer, I wasn't reciting a corporate mission. I was telling them what I'd been working on, one way or another, since I was a kid. My actual recruiting post from that stretch didn't lead with the company either. It read, "If you're interested in helping feed the world, hit me up."

And it worked beyond anything I could have engineered. The office filled, and we built a team of 26 off the back of that mission. We were midline on pay, sometimes low, and people were still upset when they didn't get offers. Not because of the money. We got people to buy into the mission.

That's evangelizing. Feed the world was a company mission rather than a product vision, but getting either one to live in somebody else's head is the same selling job. A vision that lives in a document is worth almost nothing. It only matters once it's in people's heads, pulling them in the same direction. Getting it there, and keeping it there, is a selling job that never ends.

You wrote the vision back on How to Write a Product Vision. This page is about carrying it into rooms where you have no authority, and getting it to live in heads you don't manage. It's the part of the job people tend to forget, because once the vision is clear in your own head, it's easy to assume everyone else already gets it. They usually don't, at least not yet.

Why it's worth the effort

The bar is high. Everyone understands the vision, everyone's motivated by it, and anyone on the team can pick up the piece of work in front of them and tell you how it connects. It's a high bar, and it pays for itself three times over.

When a vision is genuinely shared, people aim at the same point instead of drifting. People understand why the work is done a certain way, so they make better calls on their own, without waiting for you. And people get more bought in, because they can see where they're going and feel part of getting there. None of that comes from a single all-hands slide. It comes from repetition and conviction over a long period of time.

It has to be yours

A vision needs an emotional core, a why that connects the work to something bigger than the task in front of someone. People don't rally around features or quarterly targets. They rally around a reason. This is Simon Sinek's point, and he's right. What people skip when they quote him is that you can't manufacture a why and expect people to feel it.

I couldn't have sold "feed the world" across those interview tables if it had just been the company's line. It happened to be mine, and candidates could tell the difference, the same way you can tell when a salesperson actually uses the thing they're selling. So find the part of the vision you genuinely believe in, and lead with that part. If you read back through the vision and can't find a piece of it you believe, stop evangelizing and go rework the vision itself, because the problem isn't your delivery.

Sell it one person at a time

The picture most people have of evangelizing is a stage. A big room, a deck, a leader performing conviction for the whole room. I've done my share of town halls and roadshows, and they have their place, but almost nobody I've watched genuinely change their mind changed it because of a stage. That happened one person at a time, in standups, interviews, and one-on-ones, and the job in each of those conversations is making one person feel like they matter to the mission.

So you listen as much as you broadcast, and you connect the vision to what each individual cares about. The Chicago interviews were exactly this. Nobody crossed that table because my deck was good. Each conversation was one engineer, one why, and whether they could see themselves inside it. A vision someone helped shape, or can at least see themselves in, is one they'll carry for you.

And they carry it, for you, to the next person and the next person. So while you move up and ultimately end up on stages and in town halls, the people you've converted in those 1x1 or small-group conversations continue the mission of the 1x1 conversion.

The rooms you're not in

In any room that isn't sold on what you're doing, there's usually one person willing to break from the group and lean your way. That person is your dissenter. Not someone who doubts you, but someone inside the unconvinced team who's open to breaking from its resistance and backing you, and that inside position buys them a kind of trust you'll never have as the outsider.

Find them and work with them, because once they're with you, they become your most credible advocate in a room you can't always be in. It's the same move from Selling Your Ideas, pointed at the vision.

You'll need that move more than once, because agreement decays. I've had people agree to the vision and the methods in the room, genuinely agree, and then land in front of senior leaders who didn't buy any of it. The agreement held only as long as the room did, and the team quietly drifted back to that leader's way of thinking. When that happens, you don't relitigate the whole vision from the start. You go find your dissenters again, the people who were closest to believing, and you start the same one-person-at-a-time work over.

Some people are never coming around

I've had executives who would not buy a vision built on real customer research and engagement, because what the research said contradicted what they believed was truly happening in the market. I spent real time trying to move them, and at some point I stopped, on purpose. They were ultimately never going to come around, and every hour I spent on them was an hour taken from the people who wanted to build with you.

The tell was simple, once I saw it. A dissenter disagrees with you and can still be reasoned with. The executives I walked away from were rejecting the evidence itself, and when evidence is the thing somebody's rejecting, more evidence isn't going to save you. So don't try to win everyone over. Lean into the people who see what you're doing and want in, and let the best argument be the work. Go solve someone's problem today, visibly, and let the people watching draw their own conclusion. Spend yourself where belief is possible.

The hardest version of this sits above you. A lot of the visions I've carried up to senior leadership and lost weren't product visions at all. They were ways of working, meaning how a team decides what gets built and what proof counts, and this playbook's stance on product roadmaps and the opportunity backlog is exactly the kind I mean. Visions like that are a hard sell upward because they don't come with a clean "here's what we'll build and when we'll build it."

And there's an honest reason for the resistance. A senior leader's time in the seat is usually shorter than we think it is, and their success gets judged on what shipped while they held it. "We shipped a lot" is an easier story to tell than "we built the right things." The resistance is an incentive, not a character flaw, and I won't pretend this playbook resolves the tension. Knowing that tells you when the judgment above applies. Some rooms come around when the results show up. Some never will, and you're allowed to stop spending yourself on them.

Say it until you're sick of it

There's an old truth in marketing, older than whoever deserves the credit for it. You'll be tired of saying your message long before your audience is tired of hearing it.

The people I coach through job searches live that line with me. From day one they hear me push mindset, the idea that they're a product, and that the whole search is positioning themselves as the solution to somebody's problem. Eventually most of them say some version of the same thing. Brandon. Seriously. We're tired of hearing about it.

I'm sure you are. Every one of them was tired of it near the beginning. But I didn't stop, and I kept pushing it, and in the end it's the #1 thing that made a difference for every one of them. By the time a message feels repetitive to you, most people are just starting to internalize it.

A product vision works exactly the same way, so don't leave the repetition to your memory or your mood. Build it into the machinery of the work. I said the vision daily at standup, and I pushed my product managers to write it into every epic and every sprint goal, so the work itself kept saying it when I wasn't in the room.

You know the repetition is working when the vision starts to outlive the rooms you say it in. At that same agricultural company I had a second mission running underneath my product work, bringing design thinking and empathy into how we built things. Nobody assigned it to me, and I never announced it from a stage.

I just brought it up constantly. In the middle of a working session I'd ask, "Can we take a moment to create more empathy in this situation?" Sometimes that was about a customer, sometimes about how we were engaging our own senior leadership. We'd stop, get closer to the person on the other end of the problem, and the better solution that came out of it made the argument for me. Eventually everyone who knew me knew that was my mission, and when I moved into a global role, I handed the North America piece of it to another leader, and it kept going without me.

A well-evangelized vision survives you leaving the room, and eventually it survives you leaving, period. On my last day, one of the people on my team said to me, "You are this company to me." Not only did that mean a lot to me, it showed that I had an impact with what I was doing.

A room full of people can agree on the destination in a workshop and still drift toward different coasts a quarter later. Saying it again, long past the point where you're sick of saying it, is what gets everyone to Disneyland in California. Not Florida, not France, not somewhere else entirely. Keep telling the story.