VMT (Product Clarity Framework)
A strategy framework and canvas for identifying weaknesses in the overall conceptual model and communication strategy behind your brand, business, or product. A tool for aligning the business/brand or product/content sides of your business.
Possible Applications
Anchor practice as a business consultant or digital strategist. Ensure branding, messaging, communications, and design choices align and amplify company vision, value proposition, etc. Improve working relationship between departments. Facilitate planning of a digital strategy or content strategy engagement. Guide teaching or self-learning in digital strategy and content strategy topics.
Of Interest To
CEOs and CMOs, design directors, strategy consultants, digital strategists, content strategists, product marketing managers, product managers and owners
Need help with this tool?
Contact me to ask a question, inquire about training, or report an issue.
How It Works
VMT is a tool for finding clarity and strengthening conceptual connections. VMT helps you walk around inside of a BIG idea and make sure that all of the smaller ideas that comprise it are cohesive and contributing to the whole.
It might fill a similar role to something like the content strategy quad, or the elements of UX diagram, but with a focus the relationship between business and brand, or product and content.
The framework has six components, divided into two columns and three layers.
business / product
vision
mission
targets
brand / content
voice
message
tone
From top to bottom, we move from strategy to tactics, or from concept to execution.
The left side is more practical, while the right is more rhetorical.
Each area of the diagram complements and informs its mirror on the opposite side:
- V/V – Our vision shapes our voice. Or voice informs how we talk about our vision.
- M/M – Our missions (activities) necessitate messaging about what they are, why they are, and to what end. Our messaging influences how stakeholders—internal and external—understand our missions.
- T/T – Targets (audiences and goals) are who and what we’re trying to reach and accomplish. Their particularities necessitate well-contextualized communication—appropriate tone. The tone of our communications communicates about who our offerings are for, and the level of importance we place upon any given idea, goal, or need.
Vision
Vision is the world you want as a result of your endeavor(s).
A clear vision is ambitious. Ambition is a crucible. It brings clarity to endeavors in many important ways. The more ambitious the vision, the more obvious it will be when things do not serve that vision — making it easier to say no to new and wasteful initiatives, for instance. If your organization’s vision is weak, absent, or poorly understood by those involved, everything that follows after will be a struggle.
Vision is typically articulated and owned by a founder, or re-articulated by a leader that succeeds them.
Voice
Voice is the organizational embodiment of your point-of-view with respect to your vision. If vision is the change you want to see in the world, voice is how you talk about getting there and why it matters. People can share a vision for the world, but have different perspectives and points-of-view about how to achieve it, or why it matters. The consistent expression of your point-of-view forms your voice.
It’s your perspective, your worldview. An organization’s voice might evolve over time, but it is not situational, and cannot be applied artificially. Articulating your organization’s voice is best done through a discovery process, not brainstorming meetings. Voices are found — discovered, articulated, and documented, in design terms — not made.
Clear voices are consistent.
Mission(s)
Organizations often lose sight of their vision in a pile of missions and activities. Without strong leadership, big missions, be they fundraisers or acquisitions or website redesigns, become gravity wells that bend all light in their direction. “Save the dolphins” becomes “organize a bigger and better Save the Dolphins party every year”.
The VMT framework chooses a different, and, I would argue, more useful relationship to the idea of mission than you will find in writing about, for instance, mission statements. Mission statements typically describe “what we exist to do” — it’s an entrenched, ongoing commitment to some specific activity, or even a way of conducting that activity. In military strategy terms, where the idea of missions comes from, this makes sense — your continuing mission is to protect the base, or maintain the readiness of a fleet of aircraft, or whatever. This tends to make less sense for businesses, who need to regularly interrogate the value of their activities.
In VMT, missions are simply the stuff you’re doing. That could be stuff that feels strategic, like a rebrand, or stuff that feels everyday, like “having an HR department”. Most of the stuff you’re doing, be it developing apps, publishing websites, or even delivering services, is not really the thing itself. They’re not the point. What’s a website today might be an app tomorrow. What’s a person-to-person service today might be a virtual assistant skill tomorrow.
Missions are planned. They have steps, deadlines, people and roles. Missions support the vision. They are things you do to achieve the world you want, not an embodiment of the world itself. If an NGO envisions a world without hunger, one mission might be political lobbying, another fundraising, another running food banks. But if their vision of the world comes to be, none of these missions will need to exist any longer.
Clear missions have an owner. That ownership can be a formal idea like “Pat is the product owner” or an informal idea like “Bryce is bringing bagels.” Missions without owners and accountability aren’t really missions at all, and don’t fit our idea of projects, either. Ownerless websites are one common example.
Message(s)
Messages are articulated ideas. If missions are the things you do, messages are how you talk about them.
Messages are not literal, specific communications, like an email, tweet, or blog post. They are the important ideas contained within those communications that you wish the audience to understand and take away from the communication.
A clear message has structure. In any given communication, a reader should be able to understand what the most important thing is, and the next most important, and so on. The more complex a message, the more difficult it will be to make it clear.
Messages are not taglines. Nike’s Just Do It slogan communicates a message that their brand is for go-getters, or perhaps that the brand can enable you to be the active person you desire to be. That slogan isn’t the only way they communicate that message, and it’s not the only message that slogan can be used to emphasize.
Messages can be communicated or inferred through actions. A company with an inclusive hiring process communicates the message that diversity matters without “saying” it, for instance. Communication professionals like content strategists can help ensure that the right messages are being inferred and communicated.
Targets
This part is a little confusing, but you just have to trust me and try it out. In VMT, targets can refer to both audiences and goals — whom we want to reach, how we want to reach them, and what we need to have happen when we do reach them.
Clear targets are specific. The audience isn’t everyone. It’s a specific group of people interested for a specific reason, or a specific change in behavior, or a specific quantity of something to be accomplished, and so forth.
Missions have targets. They’re for someone, or trying to accomplish something specific, or both. You have a vision for the world you want. Let’s say your vision is a world where U.S. cities aren’t dominated by cars. Your point-of-view (voice) in part is is that normalizing biking—getting people onto bikes, teaching them to bike, getting bikes into their hands, etc.—is the way to do it. Because of this combination, your missions might include the activity of helping cities organize bike to work days. That specific mission might have specific audience targets such as city managers, local bike collectives, or major employers. Those audiences will be interested in messages about the value it can bring to the city, the success of past events, and the support you’re capable of providing. That is a different set of audiences, and a different set of messages, than the mission (activity) of running a bike to work day in a partner city. That mission will require reaching citizens, smaller businesses, new cyclists, and so forth. You might also set specific communication goals related to the number of people you want to reach or impact. And those people will be interested in different messages.
Tone
Targets and tone exist in the contextual layer of the VMT framework — the choices we make with respect to our targets (audiences and goals) necessarily influences the tone used to communicate to, with, and about those audiences and our activities. Tone is responsive; while our voice remains consistent, because our point-of-view about the world we want does not change rapidly nor contextually, the tone of our communications and messages responds to the audience, subject, timing, and so forth.
Clear tone is appropriate. Talking about a small thing like it’s a big thing is inappropriate, and vice-versa. Talking very excitedly about a very boring thing is inappropriate, and vice-versa. Talking in a familiar way to an audience that doesn’t know you very well is inappropriate, as is communicating with people you have a relationship with as if they are strangers. You can likely imagine examples of all of these inappropriate tones in user interface and marketing copy you encounter in everyday life.
Tone is tricky and getting it right keeps plenty of savvy web writers well-employed. Personas and other audience-focused tools are again helpful for clarifying tone. An empathy map makes a nice partner to your personas and can help your writers put themselves in your audience’s shoes and craft a more appropriate tone.
Example Applications
In my practice, I use VMT to teach digital strategy and content strategy, to guide discovery and project planning with clients, to explain concepts and shape conversations as a business mentor, and to organize my own digital strategy toolbox. You might also use it to:
- Plan design, research, and other activities in each area to bake-in clarity for a new initiative.
- Use as an outline for a one-day content strategy workshop, facilitating conversation in each area with a client team (participants could add post-its with potential problems to a poster for each of the six areas).
- Map your org chart against the VMT framework to see if there are potential leadership gaps or conflicts.
- Tell a story about content strategy to people on the “business” side of the framework, or vice-versa.
- Gap analysis — guide discovery work to identify strategy, documentation, or operations gaps in each area.
- Provide structure for a lecture, learning plan, or syllabus in teaching digital strategy and content strategy.
- Organize your own digital strategy and communications toolbox.